Coming from Windows
If you moved from Windows, this is probably the app you miss most. Everything was instant, complete, and free. Nothing on macOS is all three — here is an honest look at why, and what your options are.
Everything did not search your files. It read the NTFS Master File Table — the filesystem's own index of every file on the volume — and kept a copy in memory. Because NTFS already maintains that table, building the index took seconds and staying current cost almost nothing.
The result: type three letters, get every matching file on the machine, before you finish typing. No exclusions, no ranking opinions, no waiting.
APFS has no equivalent of the MFT. There is no single structure listing every file on the volume that a program can read in one pass. A Mac tool has to walk the directory tree itself — millions of readdir calls — to learn what exists.
macOS sandboxing. Any app on the Mac App Store is confined to its own container and cannot read your filesystem. This is why a complete-index search tool cannot ship there, and must be a direct download with Full Disk Access.
Change notification differs. Windows has USN journals. macOS has FSEvents, which is good but coalesces differently and requires per-volume streams.
None of that is impossible. It is just work, which is why the Mac equivalents arrived later and cost money.
Find Any File (~$8) — searches live rather than from an index. Genuinely finds everything including places Spotlight will not go, because it looks properly each time. Slower on large volumes for exactly that reason.
HoudahSpot (~$34) — a sophisticated front-end over Spotlight's index. Excellent multi-criteria research tool. Inherits Spotlight's exclusions, because it is Spotlight underneath.
Alfred / Raycast — launchers with file search attached. Fast for apps and recent documents; not designed to be exhaustive.
Everywhere ($19, ours) — the closest structural match to Everything: build a complete filename index once, keep it current with FSEvents, search it with a scan rather than a query. Six million files index in about 31 seconds, and each keystroke after the first answers in under 2 ms. It keeps records for unmounted volumes, which Everything on Windows also did.
No Mac tool will index in two seconds the way Everything did on NTFS, because the filesystem does not hand over the list. Thirty seconds once, then instant forever, is about the best the platform allows.
No. It is Windows-only and depends on NTFS internals that do not exist on APFS. It will not run under Wine or Parallels usefully either, since it needs an NTFS volume.
find and mdfind in the Terminal are free and built in. Among GUI apps, the free options are all Spotlight front-ends, which means they inherit its exclusions.
Everything read NTFS's existing file table. On APFS there is no such table, so the whole directory tree has to be walked once.
Everywhere keeps track of every file on your Mac — including the folders Spotlight hides and drives you have unplugged. Free for a day, then $19 once.
Download for Mac