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.
Terminal.
With that many files, you should be using CLI tools.
BTW those aren’t actual PHP files, they’re most likely HTML. PHP is what they’re called when they’re code on the live website but the tools that make these archives only copy a dump of the webpages. It should have renamed them but apparently didn’t. You’ll have to do the renaming instead in order to open them. It’s also extremely likely that the links between the forum pages are also ending in .php and won’t work (the tool was also supposed to have converted the links inside the files).