How can I access Windows Search index data from Emacs? Knowing this would be useful for example when writing a minor mode that integrates Windows Search into anything mode or ido-mode.
By Windows Search, I mean the Windows 7 feature that lets you find documents by pressing Start and typing part of document file names (or part of document contents).
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Here is a little Python script providing a command line utility for Windows Search. You need to install Python for Windows extensions to use it.
Accessing Windows Search from within emacs is going to be a bit difficult because the API Microsoft provides is strongly skewed towards the Microsoft programming environment. Judging by the MSDN docs, the easiest path would be putting together a SQL query that Windows Search will accept and sending that to a PowerShell/VB script that knows how to send that query to Windows Search. You'd then tell anything/ido/icicles to incrementally send input to such a script, parse the results, and display those.
The task that you are attempting is very difficult, and much of the difficulty comes from the fact that you are trying to get two programs from very different worlds of programming to talk to one another. Completely apart from the FSF/GNU folks actively disliking Microsoft, the design of the Windows API means that the least-effort way of dealing with Windows is to use the Microsoft toolchain. This in contrast to the Unix "API" of sending plain text through intermediary programs, pipes, and sockets.