Everything – Locate files and folders by name instantly on Windows | Hacker News Reader

Everything – Locate files and folders by name instantly on Windows

voidtools.com

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I switched away from this to Wizfile [0] and I really recommend it.

That plus Wiztree [1] as a replacement for Windirstat have made me a real fan of the devs.

[0] https://antibody-software.com/web/software/software/wizfile-...

[1] https://antibody-software.com/web/software/software/wiztree-...

Care to write about why you prefer Wizfile over Everything?

Between Wiztree and Windirstat it's obvious as Windirstat is extremely slow.

I don't want to put Everything down because I still think it's a good app but anecdotally I have seen Everything using constant % CPU (I assume it was indexing search, and it wasn't a huge amount but still). This is across a few PCs I've put it on.

I believe Wizfile doesn't have an index as it does everything via the MFT so I don't even need to keep it running in the background at all times unless I want to quickly call up search. YMMV.

Their WizKey program looks like it might solve one of my biggest Windows frustrations after switching from the Mac. If it can reproduce the Mac's way of typing accented characters (eg Cmd-U followed by o to type ö) then I'll be buying it shortly.

https://antibody-software.com/web/software/software/wizkey-m...

I use the Japanese input method (from the language pack) to solve this. Wish I was joking, but when in hiragana input, you're still able to input words from a Romanji base, and entire English input in full width characters if you start you word with a capital. As the IME has to compensate for having multiple words from the same keystrokes in Japanese, with Roman characters, you get accented characters in the same menu.

I don't exactly see this as a great solution, but with my limited use, it surprises me that this is restricted to a CJK input

have you tried https://github.com/samhocevar/wincompose

I haven't tried that one, I'll add it to the list. So far I've been using AutoHotKey and a script I found somewhere, which mostly works, but is a bit awkward to setup.

This looks promising, thanks for the tip!

The "international English" keyboard adds a few shortcuts to help.

Does this support network locations? Mapping to a drive to make it work in everything works for some things but in general everything is pretty bad at non-physical and non-local drives.

Edit: Doesn't seem like it. The drive that I can add as a folder in Everything doesn't show up at all in WizFile

I'm not 100% sure as I don't search network locations, but from what I can see you can add Network-ed computers via Options -> Select Drives -> Add Folder.

I only have my own machine right now to test but searching seemed like it might work?

They don't show up at all, even the one that is mapped as a drive and works in everything.

They don't show up as normal folders in explorer.

Great suggestion. For those comparing Everything and Wizfile (which I just installed), it looks like Wizfile doesn't support regex whereas Everything does.

No UNC support, looks like.

I love this tool. Windows search is really really bad, and for some unholy reason throws Cortana and Bing into it. I want to search for things on my PC not the internet!

This is the only tool I miss from Windows on macOS and linux both. It allows you to search for every single file on your system, allows regex searches. It also allows you to sort the matching files by any arbitrary criteria, e.g, size. It is also incredibly fast, so searching a 1TB HDD is instantaneous. People are mentioning Spotlight here, and I think it is better than Windows search, but is simply not as good as Everything. I haven't tried Alfred so won't comment on it. On Linux also your best bet is to use find( or some gui which does something similar), but no tool offers the same kind of instantaneous full disk search like Everything.

While it's a client tool, most Linux distros (and osx I think too) ship with the locate command that does this too.

There is a version of locate/updatedb for windows as well. I think it is called locate32.

I cant use a computer for dev without locate

and you can also try fd https://github.com/sharkdp/fd (it works without index)

Everything use a feature provided by NTFS file system, so the `updatedb` part is incredibly fast, i haven't found anything that can even come close on macos/linux.

Locate is kind of slow, even just executing a search is slower than Everything

I like Listary - I haven't used Everything to compare, but I'm aware that they're similar.

For text file contents I'm a huge advocate for ripgrep , and for metadata...to be honest I don't have a great solution, so I'll be keeping an eye on the recommendations here.

Everything usecase is when you need to search really everything. Most times you don't and in that cases Listary is way friendlier.

On Windows, Agent Ransack is really good.

Listary is awesome. Been using it for three years.

This is a fantastic tool, been using it for years and years now. For file contents search I use AgentRansack.

Something like this, or the Sublime text omnibox (whatever it's called), is what the Windows search box should be.

Ie the one you get when pressing the super/win button then start typing. It's embarrassingly bad currently. Typing 'word' the first suggestion is wordpad, not ms office word, despite me never running wordpad other than on accident. Not only bad string matching, it doesn't take into account how frequently I use either app, despite the user tracking the OS does. Strange is the land indeed.

This, along with xplorer2, are among two most used programs on my Windows computer. Really quick in general, including thumbnail generation for pdf/images/etc and monitoring folders/files in realtime.

custom keyboard shortcuts:

CTRL+SHIFT+E - open everything

CTRL+SHIFT+ALT+q - filter pdf -> ext:pdf

CTRL+SHIFT+ALT+e - filter excel -> ext:xlsx;xlsm;xlsb;xltx;xltm;xlt;xls;xlam;xla;xlw

CTRL+SHIFT+ALT+d - filter all documents -> ext:xps;pdf;msg;docx;doc;pptx;ppt;xlsx;xlsm;csv;xlsb;xls;

documents or downloads folders -> path:documents|path:downloads

Add switcheroo to that list.

Best alt-tab supplement out there, lets you change programs by typing their name with auto-complete.

Shameless plug for my open source project for a better way to search and browse videos files you have: Video Hub App - https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App

I love VidTools Everything - but for videos you might want to see previews of the content ;)

I've used Find and Run Robot (FARR)[0] for years on Windows and can thoroughly recommend it due to its speed and suggestions based on use frequency.

[0] http://www.donationcoder.com/software/mouser/popular-apps/fa...

I have been using this for ages. The most underrated windows tool ever.

I use this, but most often as the underlying engine for the Wox launcher. [1] Everything is quite fast.

I haven’t gone deeper into it to see how I can avoid duplicate results.

[1]: https://github.com/Wox-launcher/Wox

Not sure what made this suddenly appear here after so many years, but I LOVE this tool, and now that I'm on MacOS, I REALLY wish there was an equivalent. It's mystifying to me why this isn't a built-in OS feature.

Spotlight or better, Alfred ?

Pretty good tool. Have been using this for many years. + Supports REGEX search. + Enable HTTP server and then expose the port using ngrok and you can search your system from anywhere. + Supports Hotkey (Ctrl+E is what I use)

I typically use `[Win] + [S]`, which feels more natural to me. Easy way is to disable default Cortana search bound to `Win+S` by a registry hack [1] or just use AutoHotkey [2].

[1]: https://superuser.com/a/707293

[2]: https://www.autohotkey.com/

Using everything with an autohotkey script that replaces Ctrl+F for years now.

If I Ctrl+F while an explorer window is open it allows me to search within that folder. Same with desktop, documents and taskbar.

Can you please share the AHK script? :)

Here it is: https://gist.github.com/Onurtag/166df8b88744c48e93a64b7c8965...

Awesome, thanks!

I discovered this tool last week and suddenly fell in love with it. Is it possible to bind it to a hotkey like spotlight?

However if it where to fuzzy match like sublime’s super+p I would love it even more.

Tools > Options > Keyboard > New Window Hotkey is what you're looking for :)

It's fuzzy alright: https://i.imgur.com/rYXDsgs.png – or did you mean something different?

You can hotkey it if you have a shortcut stored somewhere.

Right-click on the shortcut → Properties → Shortcut menu → Shotcut Key line

With fuzzy I mean that:

"foobar" may match a file named foosomethingbar.

Like this: https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1600/1*VeGVAZsCVUYXrbI37...

You can use https://github.com/Wox-launcher/Wox as an interface for Everything which has configurable hotkeys

Options - Keyboard - Toggle Window hotkey.

I use Alt + / to search, get results, then again to close the window right back to whatever I was foing

Interface-wise we got Fsearch (https://github.com/cboxdoerfer/fsearch) on Linux, but it's not feature complete. I love Everything, and I get a bit nostaligic over these simple but feature packed windows apps that are all but living fossils in the .NET and WFP times.

What I'm really after is a web based search portal for all my network data that's hosted on SMB shares. It needs to be easy to setup and manage (so my other half can use it) and understand Windows domain security. Google-in-a-box used to do it (badly), and MS SharePoint Search (bloated and slow). Neither of which are suitable these days. Any ideas anyone?

It's great, but it does not search file contents and metadata like e.g. mp3 tags so cannot fully replace the builtin Windows search.

For file content search I use Astrogrep. Been using it for many years and very happy with it.

One of the very few tools I really miss on OSX.

What about Alfred? https://www.alfredapp.com/

What about spotlight?

Spotlight is no where near as feature complete as Everything. Everything literally searches "everything". Searching every single file on your disk matching a regex sorted by file size, piece of cake.

I use this and it's like ripgrep gui for Windows. It's awesome.

Or "locate".

Need this on OSX

Its somehow begun to suck by making too many assumptions

Alfred does a great job of fast, system-wise file search. Not sure if you need the Powerpack or not, but Alfred’s file command (and the rest of it, come to that) is such that I call it a macOS necessity.

It is fast, even inside node_modules folder!

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