Update: now overtaken by the Everything freeware.
Poser’s search-by-keyword feature is incredibly useful. But sometimes it shows you a prop that doesn’t have a clickable route back to its folder. That can be frustrating. For instance, you can only remember the name of a prop (cupping glass, from a Wild West doctor’s pack), but want to remember the name of the pack it comes with (Bad Medicine). The prop is sitting there in your search-results, but with no way to get back to its parent folder.
So, is there a better way to search your multi-Gb of runtime? Yes, and it’s free and simple to use. It’s also faster than Poser at search. Agent Ransack to the rescue. This software is a free lite version of a larger professional file search tool called FileLocator Pro. But the Lite version works reliably for simple tasks and is quite fast. It’s completely free, and free of ads or time-bombing. It’s a much lighter and nippier solution than launching the lumbering Google Desktop service, or having Windows File Indexing constantly grinding away in the background.
Once Agent Ransack is installed, simply paste your runtime path into its “Look in:” box (this is remembered each time you launch Agent Ransack), and ensure ‘Subfolders’ is ticked. Then pop a single search word in the “File name:” box and off it goes. Agent Ransack is quick compared to un-indexed Windows Search.
Unfortunately there’s no nice visual thumbnail previews like you see in Windows Explorer, otherwise it would be a perfect content library search-tool. I guess it’s so fast because it ignores all of that.
But once you have your list of results you can highlight the file you think you want, right-click on it and choose ‘Explore Here’…
