Everything – Locate files and folders by name instantly

[OP] idw | a day ago

Saw this mentioned in a comment recently, I just downloaded, installed and used it to find a file while Windows Search was still saying 'Working on it...'. So I thought others might like to know.

Previously on HN a year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41337268 and probably other times

Thank you, whoever you were!

ctoth | a day ago

Everything is amazing. Even better if you set a shortcut key (I use ctrl+shift+/) and it's just so fast. You can even query (I just recently learned this) like:

*.txt size:>1024kb

bomewish | a day ago

Best thing about windows and biggest thing I miss. Have never been able to find equivalent for Mac — stuff that comes close but really not quite the magic of Everything. Same w Total Commander. Sad!

Groxx | a day ago

It's not a gui, but in case you hadn't heard of it before: unixes usually have a `locate` command that'll do ~instant file/folder name searches. The index is usually rebuilt via a cron job though, it's not always up to date like Windows can do.

Y_Y | a day ago

As sibling notes, you can use locate just like the patriarchs (once you do some osx-specific fiddling)

https://egeek.me/2020/04/18/enabling-locate-on-osx/

porker | a day ago

Cardinal: Fastest and most accurate file search app for macOS. https://github.com/cardisoft/cardinal

It's slower to start-up than Everything but just as useful once running.

There are a few Mac oddities like OneDrive files appearing twice because macOS is convinced they exist in two locations, but that's a minor annoyance.

rynn | a day ago

Amazing utility that just works. Windows version of ‘locate’

IIRC it loads the FS index into memory and queries directly off of it. If a simple metadata search is enough for you I don’t think you can do better

Scene_Cast2 | a day ago

WizTree uses a similar idea - load the file system indices and works almost instantly.

rsamtravis | a day ago

HOLY SHIT that is fast. Thank you!

brian_herman | a day ago

I love this I use it all the time.

spapas82 | a day ago

This is the first thing i install on windows for like 10 years. Then i set up Ctrl+alt+s to toggle the everything window.

Lammy | a day ago

I'm running the 1.5 Alpha for many of the reasons listed on its page: https://www.voidtools.com/everything-1.5a/ (especially Dark Mode and support for Properties/Tags/xattr/ADS/XMP)

e: also available in WinGet as `voidtools.Everything.Alpha` https://github.com/microsoft/winget-pkgs/tree/master/manifes...

loufe | a day ago

This tool is legitimately one of the best utilities I've ever used. I've got my entire corporate branch using it.

It's a shame Microsoft can't figure their shit out and get a high quality native search figured out.

anjel | 13 hours ago

shame Microsoft won't figure their shit out and get a high quality native search figured out.

rkagerer | 13 hours ago

Just pray they don't buy and kill it the way they did Lookout (which was an instant search plugin for Outlook).

pjs_ | a day ago

Literally the only good piece of software left on windows. Masterpiece

Lammy | a day ago

And File Pilot :) https://filepilot.tech/ (t. FP Pro license holder)

atmanactive | 23 hours ago

I prefer XYPlorer.

Lammy | 23 hours ago

I do like XYplorer as well and have a license for it too, but its startup time is just so slooooow that I can't reach for it like I reach for File Pilot.

Now written in twinBASIC for 64-bit support! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42637089

atmanactive | 23 hours ago

I have it in my startup. No time wasted to open its window.

patapong | a day ago

This tool has completely changed the way I work with files - I no longer need to remember where they are, just a part of the name. Coincidentally, this means my files are better organized, since I know I can always just jump straight there instead of having to think about the folder structure.

I use it so often that I put it in the search bar, so that I can open it with Win + 1.

sudopsuedo | a day ago

You may find FlowLauncher useful too: https://github.com/Flow-Launcher/Flow.Launcher

It can be configured to use an existing Voidtools Everything install in its settings, so a universal launcher can double as the everything searchbar

patapong | a day ago

Huh, looks cool! Thank you for sharing, will check it out.

wild_pointer | a day ago

* The tool is truly amazing. Both for simple usage, and the advanced queries that it accepts. Very powerful, like a command line tool.

* As another comment says, v1.5 alpha has many advantages. Despite the alpha label, I find it to be very stable.

* Several software integrations exist: https://www.voidtools.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=6326, I mostly like being able to see folder sizes instantly in explorer. I used xplorer2 in the past, which has a plugin, but I went back to native explorer, which has a Windhawk mod, feels like what Microsoft should have done: https://windhawk.net/mods/explorer-details-better-file-sizes

OkGoDoIt | 23 hours ago

Everything about this feels like what Microsoft should have done. It’s absolutely amazing to me that search is so broken in Windows and yet a free third-party tool can instantly find any file anywhere.

moritonal | 22 hours ago

I genuinely just don't use the Start Menu anymore. It cannot find anything, and every search will include two Internet results (Bing only of course) and a Microsoft Store reference.

reactordev | 22 hours ago

This is why it’s slow, everything you enter is being exfiltrated for ads. Windows is corporate malware.

keyringlight | 22 hours ago

One hypothetical I wonder about is what the windows ecosystem would be like if third parties could make distributions of windows, if somehow that could be licensed and enough windows building/packaging was opened up. It'd be interesting to see whether collaborations of projects would form where they pull out MS parts and substitute their own, presumably with the constraint that they maintain compatibility. I imagine it'd take a while for any commercial products thinking of getting involved to figure out sharing, trust, and how to offer it in a way companies or individuals might want to donate/pay for.

UltraSane | a day ago

This is one of the first things I install on a new Win OS install. Combined with good tagging in file names it makes finding things so fast. It is absurd Windows doesn't have this built in since it is a simple index that leverages NTFS file table.

hermitcrab | a day ago

I've been using this tool for a while. It is incredibly useful. Kudos to the developer(s).

The real question is: why is the default Windows search so terrible? Did Microsoft make it useless on purpose?

hyperhopper | a day ago

It now seems to serve the purpose of funneling users into edge, AI products, or serving ads.

dietr1ch | 22 hours ago

It's been bad since early 2000s though

Akronymus | a day ago

Because the default windows search actually iterates every folder/subfolder, rather than using the global file table, which "everything" uses

randomlurking | 23 hours ago

I think it also searches inside documents by default.

jonnypotty | a day ago

Love this program. .this plus filepilot makes windows almost usable

nabilsaikaly | a day ago

How does it handle files with long paths? Windows had limitations on that…

AndrewKemendo | a day ago

I used this for years

It is a HUGE memory hog so buyer beware

nabilsaikaly | a day ago

Do you think future devs on this tool can use a new fast method to find content within files?

Lammy | a day ago

1.5 Alpha kind of halfway does this: https://www.voidtools.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=9793

Halfway because it is fast, but it's fast because it keeps the index entirely within RAM and thus you can't yet throw an arbitrarily-large disk of stuff at it to content-index.

HumanOstrich | a day ago

I used this for a while. What I don't like is that it updates its database by creating an entirely new copy and then deleting/renaming. For me that meant a several-hundred-MB file was being unnecessarily rewritten on a regular basis. It's a rather excessive waste of resources and not a polite thing to do when a lot of people have SSDs now.

I uninstalled it for that reason.

Lammy | 22 hours ago

If you set `no_db=1` in `Everything.ini` you can configure it to be memory-only: https://www.voidtools.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=9994#:~:text...

HumanOstrich | 20 hours ago

I think re-indexing all my drives every time it runs is even worse.

Lammy | 19 hours ago

I think you could uncheck “Indexes” → “NTFS” (or ReFS, or FAT, or whatever else) → “Monitor changes” to disable that and leave yourself to press the “Force Rebuild” button at whatever cadence you like.

Or, in `Everything.ini` terms:

  allow_force_rebuild=1
  home_update_indexes=1 -- ‘use the monitor_pause and monitor_stop states’
  monitor_stop=1
  home_update_indexed_properties=1 -- ‘use the indexed_property_pause state’
  indexed_property_pause=1
  read_directory_changes=0

Also I just realized you can get a better middle ground between the default daily DB update and RAM-only mode:

   db_auto_save_type=1  -- (From daily to interval mode)
   db_auto_save_interval=<milliseconds>

and btw sorry I'm not trying to convince you to like Everything; was just curious to figure out if/how it could be done :)

Jolliness7501 | a day ago

This is most often used tool in my daily work.

I work on win11. I don't use native search because it sucks and is slow as tar drip experiment.

Onedrive/sharepoint files content search at least works at all but only in web version. Still slow as hell, unreliable, ui/ux is crap.

With Everything I search >500k real files/folders + >300k fake files in milliseconds.

tom_ | 22 hours ago

I used this a lot when I was doing Windows stuff professionally, and I always really liked it.

The command line interface is good too: supply file spec that you'd type in to the GUI, and it'll print a list of matching files to stdout, one per line. Very easy to work with. I cobbled together a bit of Python stuff so that any time I was putting together a tool that needed to search for files, it could find the Everything command line tool if present, and use that instead of os.walk and the like, for a useful speedup.

(If nothing else, "es PATTERN" (to instantly find any name matching PATTERN anywhere on the system) is less typing than "find FOLDER -iname 'PATTERN'", and finishes more quickly. And compared to using locate, there's less chance of the database being out of date.)

asciii | 21 hours ago

This tool is incredible for its simplicity. I was looking for old files I thought I deleted from flash drive and it was able to detect them instantly on my PC vs. native explorer.

throwuxiytayq | 21 hours ago

This tool is living proof that high-performance software is straight up addictive. Some folks at Microsoft could learn this lesson.

didgetmaster | 21 hours ago

How does it perform if you have one of those 30 TB hard drives filled with files (100 million+)?

Yiin | 21 hours ago

Better than anything windows provides.

didgetmaster | 19 hours ago

Obviously. I was just wondering how it does with huge numbers of files.

Saris | 19 hours ago

Everything is fantastic, I wish I could find a Linux alternative with a similar GUI and filter/search bar syntax.

joelthelion | 14 hours ago

This might be harder to do on linux because filesytems are different. If I'm not mistaken, NTFS has big tables that can be directly read without iterating through the filesystem tree. I don't think this is true of most popular linux filesystems.

madphilosopher | 19 hours ago

I typically use ninite to install this, and my favourite thing is when it says "Downloading Everything" followed by "Installing Everything". I always get a kick out of that!

newscracker | 17 hours ago

When I use Windows, Everything is one of the first tools I install. I also disable Windows search and indexing.

I use this with Keypirinha [1], which is a launcher (kinda like Quicksilver [2] on Mac) that integrates with Everything using the Everything package. [3]

This combo makes finding files as well as launching programs (or doing quick calculations or currency conversions) a breeze!

[1]: https://keypirinha.com/

[2]: https://qsapp.com/index

[3]: https://keypirinha.com/packages/everything.html

anjel | 14 hours ago

So powerful, I unitentionally slide into using it sometimes as a file manager.

testcase_delta | 2 hours ago

I use Listary, which seems to do something similar. Is there a good reason to switch?