Everything[0] by Voidtools as a Windows search replacement. It makes search practically instant.
Now that Windows search often fails to turn up even my most used files (what happened to Windows search? Was it intentionally nerfed?), Everything has become a necessity for me.
Also, to second your question: what the hell did happen to Windows search? I always just assumed I'd done something to break it (and honestly, could never be bothered trying to "fix" it... even after all these years), but apparently it's inherently broken.
I know very little about OS software. Could someone explain at a high-level how something as fundamental as file search can be rendered totally unusable? Doesn't windows have the best engineers in the world working on it?
I also thought I broke something. Since a couple of months it is absolutely unusable. It sometimes can't even find the calculator or even VSCode which I use every day.
Search is not an operating system function. It needs read access to every file you want it to find, but other than that it's just another application.
Windows has great engineers, yes, but the problem with Windows search is not an engineering problem, it's a trade-off between different use cases and performance and compatibility and innumerable other factors. Design by committee and circumstances of history made Windows search what it is, the shortcomings aren't caused by a lack of engineers capable of building Everything or Spotlight or grep or Google or whatever your ideal file search tool looks like.
I don't use windows search but, at least in the past, it took plugins to allow it to read through any format for which a plugin is registered. Of course MS included plugins for office files. Plugins for PDFs, zip files, etc. It's been around since the mid 90s. Sad if it's not working well.
I prefer Wizfile [0] personally. It seems better as far as resource consumption than Everything. Wiztree by the same devs is great too as a replacement for WinDirStat.
I can confirm this too, I have not used Windows Search in years, it started getting slow in Windows 7, now in Windows 10 its practically unusable, you search for a file and it starts doing a web search.
And you can throw Wox on top to get something similar to macOS' Spotlight that uses Everything for search and uses python or c# plugins to do everything else from calculator to PirateBay browser for some reason.
Original Wox release: https://github.com/Wox-launcher/Wox
Fork that more likely to work with latest Windows 10 since original is seems to be abandoned: https://github.com/jjw24/Wox
My install of this stopped working on my work desktop suddenly a few months ago. I was without it for about a week until I was able to figure out what was wrong, and in that time I realized just how incredibly dependent I am on this simple utility and just how much Windows search sucks for finding anything.
I don't about the SOTA but last time I tried to install it (everything) it did not have a support for indexing mapped network or disk drives. I ended up using locate [0][1] (works similar to locate and updatedb of linux/unix). I have local indexed DBs of all my disks mapped to fixed drive letters, so I know which external HD a certain file is on. Also useful to index network drives in the office.Does everything support this?
I have avoided to install Everything after I have witnessed the chaos that results from its use in everyone's folder structure. People use to leave files everywhere without any organization criteria and simply rely to use Everything to find everything.
Everything only searching file names might seem like a dealbreaker to some people but it actually provides a great incentive to give your files useful descriptive names.
I got Everything in a hotkey so it also doubles as an application launcher. It really is quite elegant.
Thank you, I just installed Agent Ransack and am checking it out. VoidTools Everything just searches filenames, not content, so this could be very useful.
I found it amusing that they also offer what is apparently the same product with completely different branding "for corporate environments" called FileLocator Lite/Pro.
Seconded. This was recommended by a friend and saved me hours since. The search is near instant, it's flexible, updates in real time. Highly recommend.
That's why I only launch it when needed. The other time, I use listary (but couldn't replace Search Everything in all cases such as I need to view the dates and sizes of the list of matched files).
I'm a long time user of quicksilver. Open source. Long time loyal users swear by its ux for efficiency. Development has slowed down recently, but it still runs great for me.
I was looking for Everything for Mac and tbh I can't say Spotlight is even close. Sure Spotlight works great for apps and files in ~/Documents/, but I find it failing when I'm trying to find some obscure file in /Library/ or with-in Xcode SDK's.
I used to use Alfred for this, but it's not really the same as Everything. I'm not sure why - something about the speed, results or maybe just the interface itself.
Some of the Windows tools use the NTFS / USN change journal for very fast access to metadata without traipsing across the rest of the filesystem. I dunno if APFS has such a thing?
Now that Windows search often fails to turn up even my most used files (what happened to Windows search? Was it intentionally nerfed?), Everything has become a necessity for me.
[0]: https://www.voidtools.com/