* 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
The real question is: why is the default Windows search so terrible? Did Microsoft make it useless on purpose?
e: also available in WinGet as `voidtools.Everything.Alpha` https://github.com/microsoft/winget-pkgs/tree/master/manifes...
Previously on HN a year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41337268 and probably other times
Thank you, whoever you were!
I uninstalled it for that reason.
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 And compared to using locate, there's less chance of the database being out of date.)
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
*.txt size:>1024kb
I use it so often that I put it in the search bar, so that I can open it with Win + 1.
It can be configured to use an existing Voidtools Everything install in its settings, so a universal launcher can double as the everything searchbar
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.
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.
It's a shame Microsoft can't figure their shit out and get a high quality native search figured out.
Now written in twinBASIC for 64-bit support! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42637089
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.