Everything Review: Still the Fastest File Search on Windows?

Who Everything is for

If you know roughly what a file is called — part of its name, its extension, the folder it lives in — Everything finds it before you finish typing. That makes it ideal for developers digging through sprawling project trees, media hoarders with terabytes of photos and video, IT admins poking around unfamiliar machines (the portable build shines here), and frankly anyone who has ever watched Windows Search spin for thirty seconds on a query Everything answers in thirty milliseconds. We break down that gap in detail in our Everything vs Windows Search comparison.

Who it's not for: people who mostly search for words inside documents. Everything is a filename engine first. If you need to find every contract mentioning a client's name, pair it with a content-search tool like Agent Ransack — or read on, because the 1.5 alpha is starting to blur that line.

Key features

Instant indexing via the MFT and USN journal

Everything's party trick is that it doesn't crawl your drives folder by folder. On NTFS volumes it reads the Master File Table — the filesystem's own catalogue of every file — in one pass, then subscribes to the USN change journal so renames, moves, creations and deletions show up in results within moments. The practical upshot: a fresh install is fully searchable in seconds, not the hours a conventional indexer needs.

Search syntax that grows with you

Plain substring search covers 90% of daily use, but the syntax goes deep when you need it:

*.psd                 every Photoshop file on the machine
ext:docx;xlsx report  Office files with "report" in the name
size:>1gb             files over a gigabyte
dm:today              files modified today
dm:lastweek ext:py    Python files touched last week
C:\Projects\ .log     .log files under one folder
regex:^IMG_\d{4}      regex, toggled with Ctrl+R

The dm: date-modified filters alone are worth learning — they're the backbone of our guide to finding recently modified files. Wildcards, boolean operators, path scoping and a full regex mode (Ctrl+R or the regex: prefix) round it out.

Filters, bookmarks and saved searches

Built-in filters (Audio, Video, Document, Executable, Picture) narrow results with one click or an audio:-style prefix, and you can define your own. Bookmarks store complete searches — query, filter, sort order — so a complicated query like "videos over 500 MB on the D: drive, newest first" becomes a single keypress.

HTTP and ETP servers for remote search

A genuinely underrated feature: Everything can serve its index over the network. The built-in HTTP server gives any browser on your LAN a search box into the host machine, and the ETP server lets another Everything instance query the index remotely — the cleanest way to get instant search on a beefy file server from a lightweight client. We use it constantly in our network-drive testing.

ES: the command-line companion

voidtools ships es.exe, a tiny CLI that queries the running Everything index from a terminal. es -size 1mb.. ext:iso pipes instant results into scripts, which makes Everything scriptable in a way almost no GUI search tool is.

Portable, and absurdly light

There's a zero-install portable build, and resource use is famously modest: in our testing, RAM sat at roughly 100–150 MB with about 1.2 million files indexed — your figure will vary with file count, but it's a rounding error on any modern machine. The on-disk index for that library was well under 100 MB.

The 1.5 alpha: content search and network folders

Everything 1.5 — long-running but still officially an alpha — adds the two features people have requested for a decade: a content: operator that searches inside files, and folder indexing, which crawls non-NTFS locations (network shares, FAT drives, cloud-sync folders) on a schedule so they're searchable too. Both worked well in our testing, with the caveat that content: scans aren't indexed by default, so they're slow on broad queries. The 1.4 stable remains the safe recommendation; the alpha is what we actually run.

Performance in our testing

Our standard rig is a Ryzen 7 machine with 32 GB of RAM, an NVMe SSD and a 1.2-million-file test library (the full methodology is on our about page). In our testing, Everything built its initial index of that library in well under a minute — typically just a few seconds for the NTFS volumes alone. After that, every filename query we threw at it — substrings, extension filters, size ranges, regex — returned and re-sorted results faster than we could perceive a delay. Typing report ext:xlsx dm:thisyear filtered 1.2 million files down to a few dozen hits keystroke by keystroke, with no perceptible lag.

File-change pickup was equally impressive: new files appeared in results within a second or two of creation. The only operations that felt slow were the ones Everything honestly tells you aren't its job — unindexed content: scans across the whole library took minutes, as any grep-style scan would. For pure filename search, we have simply never measured anything faster, including UltraSearch, the other MFT-reading tool we like.

Ease of use

The interface is a search box and a results list — a five-year-old could use it, and the window opens instantly from a global hotkey. The learning curve only appears when you want it to, as you gradually pick up syntax. Two honest gripes: the UI looks like 2009 (functional, not pretty), and the website's version situation confuses newcomers — the download page offers 1.4 stable while forum answers routinely assume 1.5 alpha features, so people install one and can't find the other's options. Spend two minutes understanding which version you're on and the confusion evaporates.

Pricing

Everything is completely free, including the 1.5 alpha, the servers, ES and the portable build. There's no paid tier, no nags, no telemetry-funded catch — David Carpenter accepts voluntary donations at voidtools.com. For what it delivers, it might be the best value in Windows software.

Alternatives worth considering

UltraSearch is the nearest like-for-like rival — it also reads the MFT, skips the resident index entirely, and suits people who'd rather not run a background process. Listary trades raw search power for workflow integration: find-as-you-type inside any app plus file-dialog magic, and it pairs beautifully with Everything (our Everything vs Listary comparison covers when to run both). And if your real problem is finding text inside files, Agent Ransack is the free content-search tool we recommend alongside Everything. See where all of them rank in our best file search software roundup.

FAQ

Final verdict

Sixteen-plus years on, Everything is still the answer to "how do I find files fast on Windows" — a free, sub-150-MB tool that makes 1.2 million files feel like a dozen. The cons are real but narrow: it's Windows-only, it's filename-first, and voidtools should really promote 1.5 to stable. None of that moves the verdict. Install it, learn five syntax operators, and you'll never tolerate stock Windows Search again. 9.5/10.