Genius UI and more than a file search. I often use it as a minimalist file manager.
I love Everything, but it might be sad commentary on the state of "modern" web and desktop UIs that a bog-standard file list now counts as "genius".
"Everything" is a filename search engine for Windows
31–40 of 103 posts
Re: "Everything" is a filename search engine for Windows
#32Search in Windows is THE indicator of how poorly Microsoft has maintained their core operating system, IMO. What could be more significant over the last 20 years than "search", and where does there exist a worst implementation of it in a major piece of software? Everything really puts a spotlight on this with how simple and effective it is.
>Search in Windows is THE indicator of how poorly Microsoft has maintained their core operating system, IMO.
Upvoted.
Bing(o)!
Re: "Everything" is a filename search engine for Windows
#33Search in Windows is THE indicator of how poorly Microsoft has maintained their core operating system, IMO. What could be more significant over the last 20 years than "search", and where does there exist a worst implementation of it in a major piece of software? Everything really puts a spotlight on this with how simple and effective it is.
Windows Explorer can't even sort files in a timely fashion most of the time. It's pathetic.
Re: "Everything" is a filename search engine for Windows
#34I used UltraSearch [1] a few times and I think it does a similar thing to Everything, access the NTFS data structures directly so that it provides essentially instant search results and directly after installation without the need to build an index first.
Re: "Everything" is a filename search engine for Windows
#35Microsoft should buy them out and add bing to get a bang for the buck. Building functional software as a ex tortion tool for intentionally dysfunctional ecosystems. 2024..
bing. bang. buck. 2024?
er. heard this somewhere before. much before.
embrace. extend. extinguish. ?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extingu...
Re: "Everything" is a filename search engine for Windows
#36Search in Windows is THE indicator of how poorly Microsoft has maintained their core operating system, IMO. What could be more significant over the last 20 years than "search", and where does there exist a worst implementation of it in a major piece of software? Everything really puts a spotlight on this with how simple and effective it is.
I seriously don’t understand how searching for a file in windows takes so long and yields such crappy results? What abomination must there be under the hood for it to be this consistently bad for all of these years? Microsoft devs chime in if you have any insight.
Re: "Everything" is a filename search engine for Windows
#37I've used Everything for as long as I can remember, and it has completely spoiled me on search/launcher functionality. Perfect UI, perfect results ordering (no cute prediction about what you might want), and, of course, truly instant results and a truly live index - it will find files created one millisecond ago. I also use Launchy specifically for launching programs. Same instant results, though not live-indexed. Wh…
PowerToys run and FlowLauncher both have good plugins that use Everything:
https://github.com/lin-ycv/EverythingPowerToys
https://github.com/Flow-Launcher/Flow.Launcher.Plugin.Everyt...
Re: "Everything" is a filename search engine for Windows
#38Search in Windows is THE indicator of how poorly Microsoft has maintained their core operating system, IMO. What could be more significant over the last 20 years than "search", and where does there exist a worst implementation of it in a major piece of software? Everything really puts a spotlight on this with how simple and effective it is.
I agree that searching on Windows sucks but I guess there is a trade-off to be made. You can use very abstract APIs that will work for all kinds of file systems, whether a local disks, a DVD, a USB connected phone, or a network drive, but it will be slow and limited because you can only rely on the lowest common denominator. On the other end of the spectrum you can build highly specialized functionality that can be fast and take advantage of all the features of the target file system, maybe even accessing the medium at the block level, but it will only work for a specific target. So I can at least see how you can end up with what we have.
Re: "Everything" is a filename search engine for Windows
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes: you can build an index of file names on any file system.
No, it's not that simple. Everything is using native NTFS index/journal, which is behind its unique feature: real-time updates of literally everything Other tools building an index via other methods can't do this as fast (creating the initial index and keeping it up-to-date) There is no other equivalent app outside of Windows Thus I'm wondering whether newer FS can support this in principle, and maybe there is hope s…
In other FS/OS you'd need to use stuff like inotify/kqueue to build your own equivalent of USN Journal, but yeah.
Re: "Everything" is a filename search engine for Windows
#40I don't know much about filesystems, but I have heard it said (including at least one comment in this thread) that only NTFS enables the live indexing of Everything, and that there is not an equal tool on Mac because of this. Can anybody corroborate or give details about why? APFS is a very recent filesystem, and it was designed by Apple - so if this capability really is absent, presumably that's on purpose, as a tra…
The tradeoff is that file systems like NTFS or HFS+ (and other journaled file systems), can take up more space and incur write penalties (To file itself, to the log, metadata etc...). APFS is as you point out a newer more modern file system, that has efficient resource sharing (like copy on write) and snapshot support.
You can have a fast indexed based search on APFS, but you'll pay for it with a very large index size, which the average user doesn't want.