Submit portable freeware that you find here. It helps if you include information like description, extraction instruction, Unicode support, whether it writes to the registry, and so on.
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infimum
- Posts: 230
- Joined: Sun Mar 02, 2008 1:00 am
#1
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by infimum » Fri Mar 22, 2013 4:42 pm
http://sourceforge.net/projects/swiftsearch/
SwiftSearch is a lightweight program whose purpose is to help you quickly find the files you need on your Windows machine without ever requiring you to index your drives. Most search utilities that achieve similar speeds do so by indexing drives while the computer is idle, but because idleness detection is so difficult to get right, in practice they end up slowing down the whole system just to speed up search. SwiftSearch works differently: given administrator privileges, it completely bypasses the file system (only NTFS supported) and reads the file table directly every time, which speeds up search by many orders of magnitude. Typically searches yield full results in ~10 seconds or less, a significant speedup for many users. As a bonus, this program also supports path-based search (for example, you can search for "*Program*\Windows*"), regular expressions (just start the search name with '>' character), and full directory sizes. Its goal is to be simple, swift, and intuitive to use.
Its settings don't seem to be stored anywhere, therefore portable
Can anyone confirm this?
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I am Baas
- Posts: 4148
- Joined: Thu Aug 07, 2008 4:51 am
#2
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by I am Baas » Fri Mar 22, 2013 4:58 pm
Requires admin privileges
Does not seem to play well with sandboxie, could not test.
Bəəs 2.0
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NickR
- Posts: 105
- Joined: Thu Aug 26, 2010 6:37 am
#3
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by NickR » Sun Mar 31, 2013 2:57 pm
I tried this the other day when I needed to search a USB 2TB backup drive in a hurry.
'Everything', which is great, was already running on the fixed drives.
I didn't want to add a huge USB to Everything's config, settings or DB
SwiftSearch : opened straight up, no config needed,
clicked on the drive, entered part of the filename and almost instantly found the files !
I use and trust 'Everything', but I will keep SwiftSearch to hand for jobs like this
Very impressed - Thanks to the devs
also the screen wasn't messed up in any way (on XP)
Edit > ahh... Sorry pardon - My screen shot below looked much better (ie normal) IRL - I habitually minimise the colours for small file sizes
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Marc
- Posts: 157
- Joined: Sun May 15, 2011 6:06 pm
#4
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by Marc » Tue Apr 02, 2013 8:27 pm
Unfortunately Everything doesn't allow to search using the last saved database before the initial db update finishes, which for large drives can mean 20 minutes or more (even though I have excluded some drives to speed up the process). Will definitely give it a try, thanks for posting.
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Midas
- Posts: 5818
- Joined: Mon Dec 07, 2009 7:09 am
- Location: Sol3
#7
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by Midas » Sat Oct 05, 2013 10:30 am
Thanks, I am Baas. I have been using SwiftSearch quite a bit lately because, contrary to Everything, it doesn't auto launch a database update on startup...
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NickR
- Posts: 105
- Joined: Thu Aug 26, 2010 6:37 am
#8
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by NickR » Sat Oct 05, 2013 7:18 pm
@ Midas
Hi
See special version of Everything 1.2.1.371b
This is in effect a 'Read only version' and does not update the existing database.
(or any other Everything database you point it at

NickR
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Midas
- Posts: 5818
- Joined: Mon Dec 07, 2009 7:09 am
- Location: Sol3
#9
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by Midas » Sun Oct 06, 2013 12:29 am
Thanks,
NickR. I'll check that version -- it still a beta, right?

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webfork
- Posts: 9794
- Joined: Wed Apr 11, 2007 8:06 pm
- Location: US, Texas
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Contact:
#10
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by webfork » Thu Jun 05, 2014 4:13 pm
Still no as-you-type functionality but I do like the open source and license (Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License V2.0).
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Midas
- Posts: 5818
- Joined: Mon Dec 07, 2009 7:09 am
- Location: Sol3
#11
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by Midas » Fri Jan 30, 2015 3:46 pm
SwiftSearch v4.1 is released (changelog and download info follows).
http://sourceforge.net/projects/swiftsearch/files/Version%204.0/ wrote:This version contains a complete rewrite of this application. It should exhibit significantly lower memory usage and work at a slightly faster speed. (On my system, it is 10% faster and uses 60% less memory.)
A few features in the previous version have NOT yet been added to this rewrite:
[*]No automatic periodic refresh.
[*]No automatic device detection/removal.
[*]No support for showing deleted files or hidden NTFS attributes.
This 32-bit version contains an embedded copy of the 64-bit version which is automatically unpacked and run. However, if you want a plain 64-bit version (e.g. for a Windows PE environment) then you can extract it using a resource editor. Alternatively, if you want a plain 32-bit version then you can delete the 64-bit resource from the executable and the 32-bit version should automatically run.
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I am Baas
- Posts: 4148
- Joined: Thu Aug 07, 2008 4:51 am
#12
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by I am Baas » Sun Feb 01, 2015 3:32 am
Tested SwiftSearch v4.1 x64 portable
Bəəs 2.0
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billon
- Posts: 844
- Joined: Sat Jun 23, 2012 4:28 pm
#13
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by billon » Mon Dec 21, 2015 4:06 pm
Latest version 4.2.1
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I am Baas
- Posts: 4148
- Joined: Thu Aug 07, 2008 4:51 am
#14
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by I am Baas » Mon Dec 21, 2015 6:38 pm
billon wrote:Latest version 4.2.1
Thanks billon.
Version 4.2.1 (2015-11-29)
- Minor bug-fix when double-clicking
- Double-clicking opens file instead of parent folder
Version 4.2 (2015-11-29)
- Double-clicking now opens the item instead of opening its container
- Bug fixes and optimizations
Bəəs 2.0
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billon
- Posts: 844
- Joined: Sat Jun 23, 2012 4:28 pm
#15
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by billon » Tue Apr 10, 2018 11:56 am
Latest version is 6.1 from 2018-03-19
Version 6.0 (2018-03-11)
- Lots of new features:
- Add "Dump to Table" option when right-clicking
- Show the number of descendents (nested files/folders)
- Report the storage device read speed in real-time
- Hide NTFS metadata
- Fix sorting so that clicking columns is more intuitive
Version 5.1 (2018-02-24)
- Improved performance dramatically for volumes with lots of contiguous empty file records in the MFT.
Version 5.0.3 (2018-02-22)
- Bug fixes (fixes crash on Windows XP)
Version 5.0.2 (2018-02-09)
- Fix pattern matching bugs:
- ':' should not match drive letter without '\' being present
- '?' was not handled correctly for wildcards
Version 5.0.1 (2018-02-09)
- Fixed bug for path matching (C:\* returned empty results)
