Everything

voidtools Everything is a freeware that indexes each and every single file and folder on your disks for you to find them as fast as you can type.

It has powerful filtering capabilities whether it's by file size, modified date, video frame rate or by group of filters e.g. for all files that have video extensions

Installation

Get the updated Everything 1.5a here:

https://www.voidtools.com/everything-1.5a

(scroll down for what's new compared to 1.4)

It's also available on Scoop

scoop.cmd bucket add versions
scoop install versions/everything-alpha

And winget:

winget install -e --id voidtools.Everything.Alpha

For Linux users, check out FSearch as an alternative

Search examples

All of the minecraft screenshots you took this century:

20??-??-??_??.??.??.png

All MP4 videos in a certain folder (recursive)

path:D:/Vids *.mp4

* is a wildcard pattern for any characters, *.mp4 means all files that end in .mp4

? is a wilcard for a single character, e.g. ?.png means any png file that has a name with one character e.g. a.png

With enough practice you can find anything on your system without effort

See https://www.voidtools.com/support/everything/searching for more reference

Setting up the UI

Having to manually open up a third party app each time you want to search is not convenient,

1. You can set a shortcut in Tools -> Options... (CTRL+P) in the General -> Keyboard named Toggle Window Hotkey, I've been using CTRL+SHIFT+E for years, it really turns Everything from gimmicky to a must-have.

2. Using ALT+P lets you toggle preview of the file you have selected

3. In View you can enable Filters which show a list of file types (e.g. image, audio, video, documents) which essentially are search presets, just like files you can select multiple of them when holding CTRL

   I made my own called Dev which has search value ext:ps1;cmd;rs;json;js for to capture all of the files I use within git repositories

4. You can have extra sorting options by adding more colums, just right clicking any of them: