Yeah, we all know search on Windows sucks and will only continue to get worse (thanks, Copilot!👋).
Sure, many of you have installed #Everything by #voidtools to find their files.🔎
But did you know that there's a modern EverythingToolbar you can install as the UI for the search index?😮 I sure didn't, but now I do:
One of my favourite utilities on Windows is voidtools 'Everything', which I use constantly every day, basically as my launcher to replace the terrible start menu search.
'Everything' is extremely fast and easy to use, and the killer feature is that it updates its search index in realtime. When a file is created/deleted/renamed anywhere on your computer, 'Everything' displays the change instantly.
Does such a tool exist on Linux? Either GUI, or command line (ideally both)?
I know that commands like 'locate' exist which depend on periodically re-scanning the entire filesystem and building an index from that, which is not what I'm looking for.
Some minutes spent searching for an answer to this turns up discussions from 10+ years ago along the lines of "you can't do this efficiently on Linux because you can't monitor directories recursively".
More recently there are mentions of the API 'fanotify' which at first glance does appear to support monitoring an entire filesystem, and people saying "gosh it sure would be nice if somebody built a search tool that used this", but I haven't seen any strong indication that this has happened, or that such a tool exists.
No joy.
Thanks to #VoidTools #Everything I can say that I used it since the move to the new house and I think I have ID'd what case it was stored in. But I haven't seen the case in years either.
Where oh where did I shove this goddamn thing?!
Things I severely miss in #linux desktop.
A real alternative to #voidtools #everything https://www.voidtools.com/
A real alternative to #sharex
https://getsharex.com/
So yes I know alternativeto etc.
@dredmorbius I think it was you who linked to a post which suggested #Everything¹ for #Windows (probably that one about the rigorously documented multi-stage install procedure of that user), and I would like to thank you for doing so. :)
It's a wonderful piece of software that makes finding files by filename a lot more pleasant than Windows' built-in options.
¹ Everything at #VoidTools: https://www.voidtools.com/
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