I downloaded an old website forum archive and it took hours to extract the zip into a folder. But now that it’s extracted, finder is stuck on loading forever. I’m guessing this is because of the massive amount of files. From what I could recall while it was being extracted, most of these were PHP files. How do I smoothly browse this without my MacBook crying in pain
You need to use Terminal command line. You can filter by filename with asterisk wildcard or other options with ls command, or use grep command to match things inside the files you want.