Today’s post in the Great Software series is probably the best ones (Though I feel that way whenever I write in that series! 
) Anyways, it saves a few minutes every single day for me both at work and at home. Let me Introduce you to “Everything”. The name does not attract you much until you try it once. It is a file search engine for windows. When you hear about File Search Engine, you start thinking about hours of indexing and huge index files, even after all that a few seconds before it returns you the results. Everything (aka Search Everything) breaks the traditional thinking and performs at its best. I’ve used bunch of file search utilities in past few years but nobody beats Everything, not even comes closer.
Some of the features of this tool,
- Small installation file
- So small, the search engine is Portable. No installation!! Just run the EXE and start searching in couple of seconds.
- Clean and simple user interface
- They’ve done a very good job at keeping the UI so simple, even my mom can figure it out. All the UI element it has is, a search box (Edit box) and Search Results Pane. That’s it!!
- Quick file indexing
- Its blazing fast! I’ve never seen anything so fast.. Not even Google Desktop! From its FAQ it says, it can index 20,000 files in 1 second. Isn’t that amazing? You blink and it’s already indexed 20 thousand files. Just love the speed. This speed also gives users ability to open it only when needed. Unlike Google Desktop or any other search engine which you have to keep running all the time!
- Quick searching
- This is what Everything is best at, Searching, period. You type something and before even you start expecting results, they’re already there. The search querying is also very powerful (it even supports Regular Expression in the file search, isn’t that amazing!)
- Minimal resource usage
- When I tried the first time, I let it index my entire hard drive and tried to see where it writes the index using ProcMon tool, when I looked at the database it creates, I was stunned by its size. For my entire hard drive (maybe around a million files) the index’s size was just couple of MBs! Just pure awesomeness!
- Real-time updating
- If you keep the tool running (it has really very very small footprint, you will not even notice it even on the slowest machine!), the tool monitors the file system changes. So, any new files created on the disk, are already in the index. Every search you make reflects the real-time changes. Isn’t that awesome?
I’m highly impressed by this tool. Best of all? It is absolutely free. I think it’s one of the best free stuff I’ve seen. After using for a month though, I started leaning towards donating to developers. Seriously, its that useful!
Here is the screenshot of Everything in action!
Download it here!
Enjoy!