Everything – Fast, Intelligent Search

04/30/2010
13 COMMENTS

Everything is small, free and portable application designed to search through a system at crazy fast speeds. It achieves these fast searching speeds by only the searching file names, rather than the contents of the file.

Where this really tears away from the built in Windows search (other than its incredibly fast searching) is that it supports boolean and regex operators. For example, if you want to search for ABC but want it to exclude any file with 123 in its name, you would do: abc !123

Or perhaps you want to search for a file that is named “grey”, but you also might have saved it as “gray”. You could search for both with: gr(a|e)y

It takes a few seconds to archive your files when it is first run (about 15 seconds for the 3TB in this system) but once it has done that, all future search results will appear almost instantly.

Be sure to read Everything’s FAQ to see its full capabilties and the boolean/regex commands it supports.

Screenshots:

Downloads:

Download from Official Site – 272kb

More Information

Special thanks to lebpcmedic for recommending this one.

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Computer Repairs Perth says:

05/01/2010 at 06:38

Nice app. I can see myself using this a lot.

Vicenarian says:

04/30/2010 at 22:40

Also, you can search for file extensions (like you can in regular Windows search).

E.g.

*.iso

Would find all .iso files on a system.

Stephen Risinger says:

05/01/2010 at 10:07

Everything is a good tool if the only files you need to find are on your local hard drive. IndexYourFiles (at http://www.indexyourfiles.com) has similar functionality, but will search user-specified network shares, as well!

Mathieu Gagnon says:

05/01/2010 at 12:51

I use it with the hotkey ctrl-alt-shift-z

I suggest you use a hotkey that is close to Ctrl-c, ctrl-v , it’s fast

I use this thing on average 10 time a day

Pejeno says:

05/01/2010 at 12:57

I always carry a copy of Everything on my thumb drive. It works flawlessly to catch some viruses (It shows every file, even if it’s flagged as hidden, system, and/or read only). It’s a beauty.

The closest thing I’ve found to Everything’s functionality on Linux is Gnome-Do’s Locate plugin (provide you edit /etc/updatedb.conf so it can index NTFS mounts).

Anybody knows of a better alternative?

And no, Beagle and Tracker won’t work. They’re too heavy (Everything’s quite light on resources), and their interface seems at times oversimplified and at times bloated.

Computer Repairs Perth says:

05/02/2010 at 06:05

@Stephen. Thanks for the link to IndexYourFiles. Just been playing with it and it’s another great tool and portable.

Ron says:

05/01/2010 at 18:00

I’ve been using it for a year or so. It’s great.

If you use FireFox it goes really well with the “PlainOldFavorites” addon. POF adds an IE “Favorites” menu item so both browsers share the same favorites/bookmarks. And since I also redirected my “Favorites” folder from the default to a data drive I now have both my USER and ADMIN id’s using the same set of Favorites.

My only problem is that it requires Admin access so the first time I start it each session I have to give it the admin password. I haven’t been able to get any of the “Runas” alternatives to work, yet.

I found another similar tool called “Ultrasearch”, but I still prefer Everything.

One Repair Spot says:

05/02/2010 at 18:15

Thats pretty cool how you can search both letters
““gray”. You could search for both with:gr(a|e)y”
this will be a useful tool for me, thanks.

Computer Too Slow Repair says:

05/02/2010 at 13:22

Cool application. Very helpful when I lose a file or someone else does and I need to help them “recover” it.

Internet Age says:

05/03/2010 at 05:51

Everything definitely is going to make my life a lot easier. There is nothing quite as aggravating as dealing with search in windows….boring…now the trick is to make sure that your titles are descriptive and accurately reflects your content.

MI Computer Repair says:

05/04/2010 at 09:37

Definitely a great little app. Been using it for awhile now. It’s almost like you’re back in Windows 3.1 era where you had mere MB’s of data to search through and an easy-to-use search utility. It’s that fast and simple–except now you’re searching through GB’s.