Everything

Everything is a tool from VoidTools that indexes your drives and provides a search interface to find files and folders by name almost instantly. If you just want to search for files by name, Everything is the best tool available on Windows. I install this software on every Windows machine I use. Everything is freeware, but not open source.

Installation

Download and install Everything from the official website. A portable option is also available. I recommend the installer version because it can run as a service and index files immediately when you log in.

Using Everything

Run the Everything app. Everything indexes your system the first time it starts up. This only takes a few seconds, but the app will be unresponsive during indexing. Once indexing is complete, you can try the following:

Search By Name

  • Start typing a file or folder name. For example, enter docx to find all Word documents.
  • Put a space between search terms, like report 2025 to find files with both words in the name. The matching is case-insensitive. The search would find the words in any order in the name, such as 2025 report.pdf or report_final_2025.pdf.
  • Use regular expressions for more complex searches. For example, regex:^r.*docx$ finds files that start with r and end with docx, such as report.docx or resume.docx.

Column Layout

  • You can right-click on the column headers to add or remove columns. For example, you might want to show the Date Accessed column to see recent activity on a computer.
  • Click on a column header to sort by that column. Click again to reverse the sort order. Be warned that if there are a lot of search results, the sorting can take several minutes and make the app unresponsive. So query first, then sort.

Using Dates

You might be looking for a file that you know was changed recently, or you know the year that you made it. Or, you might want to find recent activity on a computer.

  • You can search for the date modified using dm, such as dm:>2025-10-15. This would find all files with a date modified after October 15, 2025.
  • You can use da for date accessed and dc for date created.
  • You can use relative dates, such as dm:today, dm:yesterday, or dm:lastweek.
  • You can use ranges, such as dm:2024-01-01..2024-03-31 to find files modified in the first quarter of 2024.
  • The >, >=, <, and <= operators are supported.