Anyone who has ever had to search for any files in Windows knows about Everything. Don’t get me wrong: Everything is a great tool for searching files and folders. Especially if you need to quickly find where a file with a specific name is located.
I have been using Everything for a long time and I still do. However, there are some things that I didn’t like about it and that is why I created WinFindr.
Search files, folders and registry data
Everything only searches for files and folders. It does not search for registry data. Obviously, you can use Windows Registry Editor to search for registry data, but it is not as easy as using a single tool that can do both, and it gets awkward if you want to search both filesystem data and registry data and save the results to a file.
No indexing required
By default, Everything is always running on the background while you use your computer, indexing your files and folders. While typically this works well, many users have reported issues with this, such as high CPU or RAM usage. WinFindr does not need to be always running.
Truly portable
While Everything has a portable version, it is not portable in the sense that you could just copy the executable file to a USB drive and use it on any computer without any kind of installation or assumptions of things running on the computer.
WinFindr is truly portable. You can just copy the executable file to a USB drive and use it on any computer. If you save your settings, they are automatically saved to the USB drive, so your settings will be there even when you use it on another computer.
Built-in PDF content search
Everything supports searching for files based on their content. But for PDF files, it requires you to have third party software installed. WinFindr has builtin support for searching for PDF files based on their content. This is again important if you want to have a search utility on a USB drive and take that with you.
With Everything, you need to assume every computer has specific third party software installed. With WinFindr, you can just search for PDF files based on their content without any additional software.
Follow the document content search tutorial to search inside PDF, Word and other supported formats.
Natural language search
WinFindr supports many types of natural language search such as ignoring accented characters - For example, a search term “cafe” will match “The best cafés in Braga.pdf”.
WinFindr also supports a natural search option to ignore derived words and conjugations in English. For example, a search term “invoice” will match files such as “Invoicing.pdf”.
Furthermore, WinFindr also supports proximity search. For example, to search for files whose name (or content) includes search words “cute” and “cat” and both terms must be found at most, say, 6 words apart.
WinFindr also supports phonetic search. For example, a search term “peace” will match “piece.pdf” because they sound similar.Easy to use
WinFindr displays all the search options and features on its UI, on a single view. It is very intuitive and easy to use.
Everything follows a more classic command line type approach, where you need to type what you want to search using a specific syntax. That can also be easy to use, but the learning curve is steeper and it’s not exactly intuitive.
Why doesn’t WinFindr support indexing?
Everything and the Windows Search are known for their indexing. Windows tells you that you need to have the indexer running to search for files and folders and when you install Everything, it asks you how do you want to keep the indexing running.
This is also a source of some issues for many users. You can find many users reporting online that this type of indexing is using a lot of system resources or causing other issues.
WinFindr doesn’t use any kind of indexing. Instead, it uses application-level caching to speed up the search. While this is not as fast as Everything’s instantenous search, it is typically faster than the Windows Search and it has its advantages.
Another reason why WinFindr doesn’t use indexing is philosophical. I believe it is the duty of the hardware and the operating system to use caching and indexing to make disk access and searching fast. As a developer, I find it odd if all third party software that ever needs to look up for any data would need to rely on building and maintainting their own indexing systems.
As mentioned, there are many advantages to not using indexing. That being said, there are also some disadvantages. The main one is that if you are running a system with a lot of network drives and you need to search for data on those drives, you probably need to have some kind of indexing in place to avoid a lot of data from being accessed through the slow network connection. If that is your primary use case, then a no-indexing tool like WinFindr is not for you.
Comparison table
Since everything looks better in a table, here is a comparison table of WinFindr vs. Everything vs. Windows Search.
| WinFindr | Everything | Windows Search | |
|---|---|---|---|
| File search speed | Fast | Faster | Slow |
| Requires indexing | No | Yes | Yes |
| Supports searching | Filesystem, registry, inside compressed files, inside documents | Filesystem, inside compressed files, inside documents with third party software | Filesystem, inside documents with third party software |
| Natural language search | Yes | No | No |
WinFindr is a great alternative to Everything
Usually when you read comparisons where someone compares a software they made to the competition, they are basically wanting to say that their software is far better than anything else.
That’s not my point, not at all. I think Everything is a great tool and I still use it almost every day. But there is also many use cases for WinFindr.
If you are comparing WinFindr with the built-in Windows search experience, see the Windows Search alternative page.
Download WinFindr
You should download WinFindr – because searching for files with Windows Search is like dating apps: you know what you want, but you’ll never find it.