Every now and then, you come across a tool so efficient, so elegantly simple, that it quietly becomes part of your daily workflow. It doesn’t shout for attention, it doesn’t try to sell you features, and it doesn’t demand complicated setup. It simply works — instantly, reliably, and better than anything built into Windows.
For me, that tool has always been Everything Search by VoidTools.
I’ve been using it for well over a decade, yet somehow it slips past the radar of many Windows users. And even for those who have heard of it, they often haven’t explored its full depth — its instant indexing, advanced operators, metadata searches, content scanning, bookmarks, filters, custom columns, and a massive library of functions that rival what you’d expect from data tools, not a simple search utility.
This article walks through the experience of using Everything, starting from the basics and gradually stepping into the advanced features that make it an essential part of the modern Windows environment.
Experiencing Search the Way It Should Have Always Worked
Before understanding the brilliance of Everything, you have to see how differently it behaves from Windows Search. When you open the application for the first time, you’re greeted with a long list of files. The surprising part is realising that this isn’t a preview or a cached sample — it is literally every single file on your computer, often millions of entries, presented instantly without a second of hesitation.
Scrolling is fluid. Sorting is immediate. Typing triggers real-time filtering, updating the full list letter by letter. Search for Test.txt, and the exact file — along with every variation containing that string — appears instantly.
This speed isn’t a trick. Everything uses the NTFS Master File Table (MFT) to index file names directly from the filesystem. No content indexing, no background crawling, no CPU-eating searches. Just raw speed.
And once you see what “instant” really feels like, it becomes difficult to tolerate the sluggish experience of Windows Search again.
Windows Search: A Reminder of How Slow Things Used to Be
To appreciate Everything, it helps to attempt the same search in Windows File Explorer. Even with indexing enabled, Windows struggles with even the simplest requests. Point it to your Documents folder and ask it to find a file that’s sitting plain and visible within it, and you may still watch it spin endlessly.
Move the search to the root of a drive, and the wait becomes even more painful. Windows slowly gathers fragments of matches, often getting results wrong before it finally finds what it should have located instantly. Sometimes it simply fails to show the file at all until you adjust the query or navigate manually.
This contrast is not just about convenience — it highlights how deeply Everything changes your relationship with file management. It removes friction from everyday use.
Getting Everything: Choosing the Best Version
Everything’s website, VoidTools.com, offers two main versions:
- 1.4 stable, which is the officially listed release
- 1.5 alpha, which is far more modern, polished, and feature-rich
Despite being labeled “alpha,” version 1.5 has been under active development for years and is remarkably stable. It introduces:
- Dark mode
- Tabbed search
- Huge metadata improvements
- An enhanced function library
- Better indexing controls
- More responsive UI
The main site often lists an older build of the alpha, so users who want the latest improvements usually visit the developer’s forums where newer builds are posted along with detailed change logs.
It’s worth taking that extra step — the improvements in 1.5 genuinely elevate how you use the tool.
Learning the Basics: How Everything Interprets Your Searches
Once installed, the magic of Everything lies not just in speed but in how flexibly it interprets your queries. When you type in multiple terms separated by spaces, Everything treats it as an AND search, meaning all terms must appear somewhere in the file or folder name. The order doesn’t matter.
So searching for:
settings test
…returns anything containing both “settings” and “test,” regardless of order or spacing. Add quotation marks and you force an exact match, including spaces.
You can also restrict your search to a specific location just by typing the path:
"C:\Projects" report
Everything instantly filters for the term “report” inside the given directory.
These simple behaviors already make a world of difference.
Introducing Advanced Operators: The Real Power Beneath the Surface
The tool becomes even more impressive once you begin using operators. These give you precise control over how Everything evaluates your queries.
A few examples:
- OR operator:
test | samplereturns items containing either word. - NOT operator:
test !badreturns items with “test” but excludes any containing “bad.” - Wildcards:
*.txtfilters by file extension.
With these alone, you can slice through millions of files with unbelievable ease.
But this is only scratching the surface — because Everything supports function filters, one of its most powerful systems.
Exploring Function Filters: Precision Searching for Any Need
Function filters are special search terms ending with a colon. They allow Everything to inspect file attributes and metadata, not just names.
For example:
file:
returns only filesfolder:
returns only directoriesext:pdf
returns PDF filespath:Adobe
matches files only inside Adobe-related folderscontent:keyword
searches inside file contents
Content search is slower because Everything needs to open files and scan through them — but even then, it is impressively fast. You can even specify encoding types, useful for developers searching through binary or UTF-16 files.
Case sensitivity can be toggled with:
case:for strict matchesnocase:to force case-insensitive behavior
Filters can be chained together, grouped, or combined with OR operators in sophisticated ways that feel closer to database querying than simple file search.
This feature alone makes Everything invaluable for developers, power users, and anyone who deals with large volumes of files.
Searching Metadata: Beyond Names and Paths
Everything isn’t limited to file names. It can search metadata fields — and it exposes almost any property available in Windows.
By right-clicking the column header and choosing Add Column, you’ll see the massive number of available fields:
- image dimensions
- audio duration
- video codecs
- document authors
- executable product versions
- file owner
- program name
- and dozens more
Once added, you can right-click a column and choose Search For to create a filter that scans only for that metadata property.
For example:
programname:Photoshop
…returns all files whose embedded metadata lists Photoshop as the program that created or last edited them.
This opens the door to incredibly precise searches that would be impossible in normal Windows tools.
Useful Filters You Might Not Expect
Two interesting filters worth mentioning are:
- distinct:
shows only one item per repeated value of a property - unique:
shows only items whose property values appear once in the results
These are especially interesting when exploring image collections or large music libraries.
Beyond Search: Bookmarks, Filters & Workspace Management
As you become more comfortable with Everything, you begin to shape it around your own workflow.
Bookmarks
You can save:
- column layouts
- search terms
- filter combinations
This allows you to quickly return to a specific view — for example, a saved search that shows only folders containing certain file types, complete with custom metadata columns.
Saved Filters
These act quietly in the background, filtering results without cluttering your search bar. For instance, you might create a filter that hides noisy system folders, then set it as the default.
Indexing Options
Everything can also index:
- content
- properties
- size
- timestamps
All of this takes surprisingly little disk space — even five million files may only consume a few hundred megabytes in the index.
Journal Index
This optional feature logs events such as renames, deletions, and moves. It won’t restore files, but it’s immensely helpful for tracking down what happened to something that vanished unexpectedly.
Advanced Custom Columns: A Feature Hidden in Plain Sight
Everything 1.5 supports custom formulas, allowing you to build your own columns that display data exactly how you want. You can convert sizes, calculate differences, extract fields, or format values — almost like using a spreadsheet inside your search tool.
It’s a deep system inspired in part by Excel’s syntax. Most users will never need it, but knowing it exists lets you appreciate just how flexible Everything can be.
A Quick Note Before You Dive Deeper
Disclaimer:
Although Everything is incredibly fast, enabling certain advanced features — particularly content indexing or extremely large metadata sets — may require more memory or disk space. Use these features intentionally and adjust your indexing preferences to match your system’s capabilities.
Final Thoughts
Everything Search is one of those rare tools that becomes genuinely indispensable once you experience it. It changes how you think about file management. It erases the hesitation that comes with searching. And it replaces Windows’ inconsistent search with something that feels instant, predictable, and remarkably powerful.
Whether you use it casually to find documents or dive into its advanced filters to manage millions of files, Everything adapts to your workflow effortlessly. And once you grow familiar with its features — bookmarks, metadata fields, regex, content search, filters, custom columns — you begin to see why so many people quietly consider it the number one tool every Windows user should install.
If you’d like, I can also create a short beginner guide, an advanced cheat sheet, or a full 2000+ word expanded version. Just say the word.
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