FS Utilities

If you feel that Windows is disappointing when it comes to its file searching abilities, you can turn to third-party applications such as FS Utilities. This is a file manager that puts emphasis on a search function capable of delivering results instantly, thanks to the fact that it indexes your preferred files and folders. This way, any unnecessary items are excluded speed up the scan time. FS Utilities gets installed quickly and without any issues. Its interface is based on a large window whose appearance may seem cluttered to users without previous experience with similar software. You can get started by dragging and dropping the files and folders you wish to use for building the search index.

The files and folders can be separately accessed from two distinct tabs. You can check out the name, extension, name and parent folder length, as well as the total containing items for each file or folder. Additional details include the total length, size, date of creation, last modification and last access, attributes, full path, and signature.

The top part of the window has an area dedicated to performing quick text searches. However, this doesn't filter results in order to exclude files which do not match. Instead, FS Utilities simply highlights matches in the index. This can be tedious when having to scroll a very long list of items.

Extra view modes are available, such as topmost and append. You can open the right-click menu of any selected file to launch it in the associated application, reveal its location in Windows Explorer, copy it to the clipboard, rename or delete it, as well as calculate its hash (CRC, CRC and last change, CRC and size, CRC, size and last change, size and last change, or extension).

We haven't experienced any compatibility issues with Windows 10 in our tests. Taking everything into account, FS Utilities has a long way to go before it can become a reliable, go-to file manager but it has potential.