Drill

Very fast file searcher without indexing

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TL;DR: What is this

• Multithreaded
• Use as much RAM as possible for caching stuff
• Heuristics to prioritize more important folders
• Intended for desktop users, no obscure Linux files and system files scans
• Betting on the future: being tested only for SSDs/M.2 or fast RAID arrays

Run

Precompiled one

Just grab the latest version and run the executable

From source

pip3 install -r requirements-run.txt
python3 src/main.py

What happened to the old code?

The old D code and other experimental versions are available in the other branches This main branch started as an orphan branch to make a clean cut with the old Drill

What is this in detail

I was stressed on Linux because I couldn't find the files I needed, file searchers based on system indexing (updatedb) are prone to breaking and hard to configure for the average user, so did an all nighter and started this.

Drill is a modern file searcher for Linux that tries to fix the old problem of slow searching and indexing. Nowadays even some SSDs are used for storage and every PC has nearly a minimum of 8GB of RAM and quad-core; knowing this it's time to design a future-proof file searcher that doesn't care about weak systems and uses the full multithreaded power in a clever way to find your files in the fastest possible way.

• Heuristics: The first change was the algorithm, a lot of file searchers use depth-first algorithms, this is a very stupid choice and everyone that implemented it is a moron, why? You see, normal humans don't create nested folders too much and you will probably get lost inside "black hole folders" or artificial archives (created by software); a breadth-first algorithm that scans your hard disks by depth has a higher chance to find the files you need. Second change is excluding some obvious folders while crawling like Windows and node_modules, the average user doesn't care about .dlls and all the system files, and generally even devs too don't care, and if you need to find a system file you already know what you are doing and you should not use a UI tool.

• Clever multithreading: The second change is clever multithreading, I've never seen a file searcher that starts a thread per disk and it's 2019. The limitation for file searchers is 99% of the time just the disk speed, not the CPU or RAM, then why everyone just scans the disks sequentially????

• Use your goddamn RAM: The third change is caching everything, I don't care about your RAM, I will use even 8GB of your RAM if this provides me a faster way to find your files, unused RAM is wasted RAM, even truer the more time passes.

Contributing

Read the Issues and check the labels for high priority ones

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