My thanks to the editors of the latest PC Pro magazine for making me aware of Voidtools’s Everything freeware. It’s a super-fast file-finding tool, and one which can be restricted to indexing just a specified folder.
It’s freeware, and similar to the old Agent Ransack. But it’s an almost instant file-finder, because it builds a local index. Here it’s showing results for the Torba caveman character for Nursoda’s Doctor Pitterbill…
I installed it without its NTFS disk-indexing option, as I was hesitant about having its driver-services persistently loaded at startup. This meant that I had to run it in Windows Administrator mode, which it then needs to build an index of files. I was pleased to find I could still have it index the main folder containing all my key Poser/DAZ runtimes.
Scanning of all my very large Poser/DAZ runtimes then took about five minutes, and it resulted in the Everything utility instantly becoming a very nice super-quick alternative to PzDB. It’s especially useful for those times when you don’t want to spend time loading and unloading PzDB, nice though PzDB is (because it understands the Poser/DAZ content systems, is a lot faster than P3DO, and has many other features).
Once installed you then just learn a few tricks with Everything…
A plain search for torba will also show DoctorBag in the search results. However if you turn on “Match whole word”, this problem vanishes.
You can search for a phrase the usual way. For example, “lost world”
You can bookmark results. For instance you can bookmark:
*keyword path:libraries
*keyword path:props
*keyword path:face
*keyword path:textures
*keyword case:MAT
You load the bookmark and just replace ‘keyword’ with the real one. The path: command means you only get results from specifically named folders. case: finds only CAPITALS. Useful when all your MAT files use upper-case.
Why the *keyword and not just keyword? Because a partial word won’t do the job. For instance, search for ShaaraMuse3D’s 3S_MysticRedLands props folder with just redlands will get you no results at all. What you need there is *redlands where the wildcard * tells the software ‘could be anything here’. It seems that *keyword and “Match whole word” can co-exist nicely.
However in some curious cases it won’t. For instance, RealMenHair will find nothing. A search for *ealMen will also find nothing. Yet *RealMen* will find the RealMenHair folder. So if you can’t find anything using the above methods, add a * wildcard to the end, as well as to the start of the search.
Also note that words need to be complete. Thus Vacuum will not find Vacuum_Zeppelin.
You can even then view results with Thumbnails of the folders, showing visual hints of what’s inside. One can also sort by “date created” and thus get a basic form of content-clustering. Both settings can be embedded in a bookmark.
What Everything won’t do is try to preview images and files natively. Instead a quick double-quick launches the folder in Windows Explorer, or previews the .PNG in IrfanView (or whatever speedy image previewer you use).
Nor can it add keywords as tags. A use-case for that is: one can’t find all Nursoda content in one’s runtime, because Nursoda does not use his name in the content’s file-path. One would then need to have PzDB to add a “Nursoda” tag to all his characters and their content. This would make them findable in one search.
Can Everything do drag-and-drop to load a character or prop into a Poser scene? If it can show the result directly in results, yes. I had success with the Doctor Pitterbill .CR2 file. However, if the result is inside a folder, then you’ll need to open it in Windows Explorer and drag-and-drop from there.
Everything should be used in combination with the free RSR to PNG Converter, which will add .PNG thumbnails to runtime content if these are missing.
The old Agent Ransack is worth keeping though, as it integrates into your Windows mouse right-click in Windows Explorer, and thus can be used in tandem with Everything…
