Right-clicking in the search box should give you a menu with the choice of "Paste" or "Undo." But you need to have text in your clipboard, or nothing will happen.
Windows 10 1909 File Explorer Search issue
![](data:image/svg+xml, %3Csvg xmlns='http://www.w3.org/2000/svg' height='64' class='font-weight-bold' style='font: 600 30.11764705882353px "SegoeUI", Arial' width='64'%3E%3Ccircle fill='hsl(128, 8%, 22%)' cx='32' cy='32' r='32' /%3E%3Ctext x='50%25' y='55%25' dominant-baseline='middle' text-anchor='middle' fill='%23FFF' %3EA%3C/text%3E%3C/svg%3E)
Anonymous
What happened to explorer search? Unable to paste the copied
file name to search for as it was in previous versions. I have to
manually type the file name and press Enter. This is terrible! Why does Microsoft only make things worse with each new version ?!
Windows for home | Windows 10 | Cortana and search
Locked Question. This question was migrated from the Microsoft Support Community. You can vote on whether it's helpful, but you can't add comments or replies or follow the question.
57 answers
Sort by: Oldest
-
Anonymous
2020-01-29T16:37:20+00:00 -
Anonymous
2020-01-29T17:05:37+00:00 Right-clicking in the search box should give you a menu with the choice of "Paste" or "Undo."
It would appear as if the update suggested to me by "neilpzz" in the post before yours has partially solved the problem of the context menu.
This optional update took nearly 30 minutes to download and install, but the ALT+SPACE window menu still appears on right-click of the Search Bar when some other element of the Explorer window has input focus, or when I right-click on the Explorer Search Bar when an entirely different application (Word, Firefox, Thunderbird, etc) has foreground focus.
If Explorer is the foreground application, and the Search Box is currently focused and has the keyboard input cursor, then a Mouse Right-Click or keyboard PROPERTIES key press brings up the appropriate context menu.
At least actual searching from within Explorer is working properly again, including advanced filters and boolean operators.
-
Anonymous
2020-02-01T14:39:53+00:00 Anyone still battling this "demon" LOL (like me) ...try this freeware called "Everything" (no ads, no spy, no bloat...). Unbelievable and blows anything Microsoft ever wrote away. I don't even BLINK at MS search tools any more - who needs the aggravation.
Hope this helps someone ...Happy searching!
-
Anonymous
2020-02-01T15:22:18+00:00 Anyone still battling this "demon" LOL (like me) ...try this freeware called "Everything" (no ads, no spy, no bloat...). Unbelievable and blows anything Microsoft ever wrote away. I don't even BLINK at MS search tools any more - who needs the aggravation.
Hope this helps someone ...Happy searching!
THANK YOU!
Just installed it. Man what a simple yet amazingly superior alternative to the mess that Microsoft created. I've just scanned my local drives and added my NAS drives and all searches are IMMEDIATE. Man this rocks!
-
Anonymous
2020-02-01T15:23:53+00:00 As one of the OPs on this problem, I can confirm that MS solution is too little too late, as due to this problem, I investigated how badly indexing is implemented by MS and I too found "Everything".
Everything is quite simply the best EVER file searching tool for Windows.
My 20 million files are indexed in a small database updated in real time and searching takes 0 seconds after things are indexed.
I will be donating and honestly, MS should publicly apologize for this prio 1 fault and how they kept it unfixed for MONTHS.
Unbelievable. A joke.