Whoever doesn’t know David Carpenter’s Everything doesn’t know what they’re missing. Whoever relies on Windows’ search feature is an ignorant, a naive, a lazy person, or a moron. Most people who use tons of files require, most of the time, to locate such files by name, not by content. And here, Everything is God!

In Windows

Suppose you have, like yours truly, some 25k ePub files on your local filesystem. Even when thoroughly organized in folders and subfolders, how can you easily locate one of these files?

Suppose you want to find a file of which you only know a part of the name, or files about a specific subject, provided that the subject is in the file name:

The search results are instantaneous.

For searching by content, I don’t trust any global content indexing crap; I go to the suspected folder (or a top folder), and I use AstroGrep.

In Linux

Everything is the most important utility I missed in Linux! Because no, locate(1) is not good enough. XFCE’s Catfish and MATE’s mate-search-tool are not bad, but they don’t maintain databases that are updated upon each file change. So I really missed Everything.

But one day, via OMG! Ubuntu!, I found out of FSearch! (It’s not such a new project, I remember having read of it back in 2018, but then I simply forgot about it.)

Look, ma, there are 2251 .conf* files in this Fedora installation, out of 881,229 files!

Now, for a full-text search with results in a GUI, I didn’t try anything yet, but one day I should try Recoll.

BTW, does anyone remember Beagle?