Command line and power tools

Everything from the command line, on a Mac

Updated 2026-07-31 · 5 min read

If you piped es.exe into other commands, this is the part of your workflow that needs rebuilding first.

What es.exe gave you

es.exe was a thin command-line client for Everything's already-running index. That detail matters: it did not search the disk, it asked the index, so it returned in milliseconds and was safe to call in a loop.

es -n 20 ext:pdf size:>10mb

The built-in Mac options

mdfind queries Spotlight's index, so it is fast in the same way — it asks a service rather than walking the disk.

mdfind -name report
mdfind -onlyin ~/Documents "kMDItemFSSize > 10485760"

It inherits every Spotlight exclusion, so ~/Library and package contents are invisible to it.

find walks the tree live. Complete and utterly reliable, and slow enough on a home directory that you will not put it in a loop.

find ~ -iname "*.pdf" -size +10M

locate is closest in spirit — a prebuilt database queried instantly. It is disabled by default on modern macOS, its database updates weekly, and it indexes paths only.

sudo launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.locate.plist
locate report.pdf

Where each one falls down

mdfind is fast but incomplete. find is complete but slow. locate is fast and complete but stale by up to a week, which for a working directory means wrong.

None of them is the thing es.exe was: instant, complete and current at once. That requires a resident index, which is exactly what the GUI app has to be maintaining anyway.

What we ship

Everywhere installs an ew command that queries the same live index the app uses, which makes it the structural equivalent of es.exe:

ew search "ext:pdf size:>10mb"
ew search "folder:Downloads" | head -20

Same syntax as the search bar, plain output, safe to pipe. It answers from the resident index rather than walking the disk, so calling it inside a shell loop is reasonable.

Common questions

Is mdfind the same as es.exe?

Similar in speed and idea — both query an index rather than the disk. mdfind inherits Spotlight's exclusions, so it will not see ~/Library or package contents.

Why is locate disabled by default on macOS?

Apple ships it unloaded; you enable the launch daemon manually. Its database also rebuilds weekly, so recent files are missing.

Can I script file searches without any third-party tool?

Yes. find for completeness, mdfind for speed. The trade-off between the two is the whole reason indexed search tools exist.