Nowgrep, way faster alternative by skipping Windows API and use NTFS directly

Ripgrep is slow. Nowgrep is fast, because I bypass the Windows slop and go straight to NTFS. Here's Ripgrep vs. Nowgrep searching through 300k files on a drive with 2M+. Nowgrep is written from scratch in C99. No borrow checker.

Sep 29, 2025 · 1:00 PM UTC

Because I bypass most of Windows, I don't get stuck in slow general-purpose system caching. So I wrote my own caching tailored to Nowgrep without degrading the overall speed and making repeat or similar searches much faster and more stable.