In Windows Explorer, it's always a mystery if my date specifier is valid. I would often forget a colon or use the wrong flag name or accidentally use a leading dash as most command line flags would accept. When there are then no search results, I mistakenly assume the document I want hasn't been uploaded yet. I email a colleague, they reply it's in the network drive as anyone in the organization would expect, I look like an amateur.<p>I've resorted to using "datemodified:this year -kind:=folder" on a keyboard macro and changing 'year' to 'month' or 'this' to 'last'... or using WSL to search.<p>One obvious problem here is that the number of files I search through changes with each season. January and February are the worst, because "last month" and "last year" overlap for one month, and then on February 1st, the query results are again exclusive. If I want all PDFs published in the past three weeks after returning from winter break, I need to use two search queries in Explorer.<p>Contrast that with Linux, where there are multiple standard, well-documented, reasonably easy to remember methods of searching by date, including within very specific timeframes---not just a choice of month or year. On the GUI side, GNOME Files has much more customizability and isn't any harder to understand than Explorer.<p>Just as the past decade has been a disappointment in home assistant progress, I had hoped in this present age, ANY reasonably query could be parsed, and optionally, the exact query shown as the machine sees and/or a plain-text standardized description of the search.<p><pre><code> [<Ctrl> + F] "PDFs from the past three weeks"
↓
Parsed: find "//doc-network/rel/**/*.pdf" /createdafter 2023-09-24
Searching for all Adobe Reader documents (PDF format) created between three weeks ago and today in the current folder ("rel") and/or any subfolder.
</code></pre>
As a bonus, the best five results matching MOST (but not all) of the query would be previewed at the bottom of the search results, slightly greyed, with "84 weaker matches found, such as...", and this could also be disabled for privacy/performance/etc reasons