Index folder for context menu handler of Windows Explorer only.

[pickwick]

From my understanding, Everything needs an index always to search on and that index can be created in three ways: Using the MFT directly by the help of a Windows service to NOT require the searching user admin-permissions. Using the MFT directly when the searching user has admin-permissions. NOT using the MFT, but simply indexing a customly added folder when neither the Windows service nor admin-permissions are available.

I prefer the latter, because I don't use Everything too often and when I'm using it, mostly for only some directories. I choose those directories using the context menu handler Everything optionally installs for Windows Explorer. In those cases, Everything adds a default search filter for the directory the context menu handler has been executed with and that filter is applied to the currently available index. If that index is not available, it is rebuilt first.

And here's the point: One doesn't know beforehand where the context menu handler is executed, so the configured folders to build and index for on startup needs to be pretty high level, something like C:\ itself or a whole user directory or alike. Indexing at such a high level might take an unnecessary long time when one only wants a few searches in a pretty low sub directory.

Instead, it would make more sense to not only filter the available index based on the chosen directory, but to build the index based on that value as well only when none is available yet. This way, one could simply install Everything without service, NOT execute it with admin-permissions and NOT configure a directory to index manually as well. Everything knows all it needs already from the context menu handler already.

Would be great to have that considered. Thanks!

[void]

Thank you for your feedback and suggestions.

I have added to my TODO list to add a command line option to specify the folders to index.
This way a context menu item could be setup to index the selected folder only.

However, at this stage, this will probably be no faster than using Windows Explorer's search.

[pickwick]

Thanks for considering, but a command line option will only be of help when that supports different directories for each and every invocation of the context menu handler.

Regarding the performance: I don't care too much. It's absolutely OK for Everything to simply be easier to handle than the integrated search in Windows Explorer. It's only that re-indexing e.g. C:\ completely when I only need a minor subset of that doesn't make too much sense and it seems that Everything provides all necessary mechanisms already to improve my use case.

[NotNull]

This will be a "special edition" of IndexThis
This version doesn't even require Everything to be installed.

How to use:
Right click a folder, a drive or the background of a folder (an empty part), select IndexThis and that folder will be temporarily indexed.



How to install:

• Create a new folder
• Copy Everything.exe to this folder
• Extract IndexThis.cmd from the attachment and put it in the same folder
• Run IndexThis.cmd
• Press i to install the conetxt menu
• Done