Is Everything really that good???

[Cynthia Moore]

[rant]I am in the process of being dragged, kicking and screaming, from my beloved Win XP to the big scary Win 10. So far, I am mostly hating what I am finding and I really hate the file search capabilities. Unless I am doing something wrong, the idiots at M$FT have removed the search option from the File Explorer right-click menu. Why in h*ll would they do that? Now I hate M$FT even more than ever.[/rant]

So I did an Internet search for better ways to do a search on Win 10. Every other result mentioned Everything and some of them made it sound way too good to be true. I hope they are right.

I have just a couple of questions before I download a copy and give it a try.

1. How well can Everything emulate the XP search facility? That is, can it add itself to the right-click menu of File Explorer?

2. If not, is there an easy way for me to limit the search to a single folder? And can include or exclude subfolders?

3. When I get the result, can I rename, open, or delete individual files and move them to another folder without losing the search results?

Are there any other tips anyone would recommend for a newbie other than reading the FAQ and Help, which I will do.

Thanks for any help getting started

[vsub]

1.It can,there is an option for that in the settings if you decide to use the portable version(which will not make it portable anymore because to have that menu,you have to write to the registry and anything writing to the registry is not a portable program)

And you can search the same way even better

2.You can either make it search your hdds or just a folder but with just a folder you are missing on the a lot of potential everything can bring

3.You can rename,move and delete.You can have multiple windows searching for different things without loosing the results...way better than winxp

And btw the search in win10 is still there but you use it in a different way
Either from the search bar at the top right or the usual way with Win+S but windows uses file indexing which takes a lot of time to build the database and it is nowhere near as fast a Everything in finding files

I also did not like Win7 for a while when I switch from WinXp and I also did not like Win10 for a while when I switch from Win7

[NotNull]

Before answering your questions: Everything works different from the search "capabilities" taht Windows provides.
In my opinion that is a (very) good thing. The basics are pretty straightforward, but there are tons of powerful features that can make life even easier (or not; a lot of people are perfctly happy just using the basics)


Your questions:

1. How well can Everything emulate the XP search facility? That is, can it add itself to the right-click menu of File Explorer?

Yes: enable Show Search Everything folder context menu item (under Menu:Tools > Options > General)
Right-clicking a folder in File Explorer will show you all files and folders in that folder.

2. If not, is there an easy way for me to limit the search to a single folder? And can include or exclude subfolders?

Just type "c:\your folder" (with the quotes if it contains spaces, otherwise you can do without) in Everything's search bar
To exclude folders: add a "!" like this: !"C:\this folder"
You can even exclude certain folders by default, so those will not show up at all. But that's for another time

3. When I get the result, can I rename, open, or delete individual files and move them to another folder without losing the search results?

Yes. Use Menu:Edit > Move to Folder for that. Be aware that if you searched for c:\folder1 and you moved a file to c:\folder2, it will no longer be in the result list.
You can also (shift-) drag the file to an open File Explorer window to move it.

Are there any other tips anyone would recommend for a newbie other than reading the FAQ and Help, which I will do.

• Most important: follow the defaults during installation.
• Default Everything will include all your local (NTFS) disks. If you have for example a network share you want to include, do so via Menu:Tools > Options > Indexes > Folders.
• Read about the search capabilities here
• Use bookmarks (Menu:Bookmarks) for common searches.
• When you "played" with Everything for a while, take some time to browse through the settings (Menu:Tools > Options) to finetune Everything.
• Other than that: Ask your questions on this forum. (almost) "Everything" is possible.

[NotNull]

@Cynthia Moore : what vsub said ... (cross-post due to my slow typing speed ....)

[Cynthia Moore]

1.It can,there is an option for that in the settings if you decide to use the portable version(which will not make it portable anymore because to have that menu,you have to write to the registry and anything writing to the registry is not a portable program)

Why would I want it portable?

2.You can either make it search your hdds or just a folder but with just a folder you are missing on the a lot of potential everything can bring

Like what, for example, would I be missing out on? I have a lot of folders with multiple levels of subfolders, like financial statements organized by year and institution. I might want to search for a file that might have gotten misfiled.

3.You can rename,move and delete.You can have multiple windows searching for different things without loosing the results...way better than winxp

Great.

And btw the search in win10 is still there but you use it in a different way
Either from the search bar at the top right or the usual way with Win+S but windows uses file indexing which takes a lot of time to build the database and it is nowhere near as fast a Everything in finding files

I didn't notice the FE search box in the upper right. My bad. I was doing all my searches from the general search box at the bottom left and getting all kinds of crap. Now that I know bout the FE search, it's working better.

I also did not like Win7 for a while when I switch from WinXp and I also did not like Win10 for a while when I switch from Win7

That's a good point. But I have been struggling with so many conversions having to do with dozens of VBA routines for Word, Excel, and Outlook and trying to figure out what still works and what doesn't. I was just at my wits end. Sorry for the rant, but I did feel a little better afterwards.

Anyway, thanks very much for the detailed reply.

[Cynthia Moore]

Before answering your questions: Everything works different from the search "capabilities" taht Windows provides.
In my opinion that is a (very) good thing. The basics are pretty straightforward, but there are tons of powerful features that can make life even easier (or not; a lot of people are perfctly happy just using the basics)

Thanks for incredibly detailed information. I'll get it installed and then get myself up to speed.

[vsub]

1.That's just a personal preference
I prefer a program to store all of its data in the program folder and not write to some outside folder or in the registry
I can just copy the program folder to another pc and all of my settings will be the same(I only need to rebuild the database)

2.Everything search is like 10 times(or more)compared to the WinXP\Win10 search,you just type and the results are already there
If you never want to search in a location other than your specified folder then you can just add only the folder and not the whole hdd but lets say you want to look for something sometimes that is not in the folder you added...well you will not find it

I have 1 million files total on my both hdds and the database is just 27mb
When I choose my bookmark that shows me all of my images on the hdd,the result is instantly displayed 3.5k images