Agent Ransack

If you've ever waited for an hour to find a file with Windows Explorer's search functionality, then Agent Ransack will be a godsend.

By now you might have learned I love light-weight tools that help doing things in Windows more efficiently and effectively. If not, read some of the other day's tech tips this month!

Okay, can we all just agree that Windows Explorer search is not great? Yes, that's putting it mildly, the results are unpredictable, searching is incredibly slow, unless you index everything but then your machine becomes slow during the many indexing jobs.

Enter Agent Ransack, a free and powerful app that searches for files and inside of files based on your criteria. For example:

Screenshot of Agent Ransack showing results for "getContent()" and "tinyMce" in all files ending in .js

As you can see in the screenshot you can search inside files and use operators like AND, OR and NOT. The search also returned all the results in 2 seconds, that includes scanning a node_modules directory with 27000 files in it!

There is a paid for version of Agent Ransack and Mythicsoft also make a product called FileLocator pro. However, after 15 years of using Agent Ransack Free, I've never felt like I was missing any features, it just chugs along and does the job I need it to do, perfectly.