Everything – Locate files and folders by name instantly(voidtools.com) |
Everything – Locate files and folders by name instantly(voidtools.com) |
* 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
Previously on HN a year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41337268 and probably other times
Thank you, whoever you were!
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...
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 uninstalled it for that reason.
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
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!
*.txt size:>1024kb
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 And compared to using locate, there's less chance of the database being out of date.)
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.
It is a HUGE memory hog so buyer beware
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.
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.
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
db_auto_save_type=1 -- (From daily to interval mode)
db_auto_save_interval=<milliseconds>
Now written in twinBASIC for 64-bit support! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42637089