Coming from Windows
Everything's options window is dense. Most of it collapses to three decisions once you move to macOS.
The Options window had a lot in it, but the parts people actually changed were: which NTFS volumes to index, which folders to include beyond those, exclude filters by name or regex, and whether to index folder sizes.
Which volumes. Still relevant, and arguably more so. Macs commonly have an external drive that is not always plugged in. The useful behaviour is to index every mounted local volume and keep records for the ones that have been unplugged, so searching still tells you *which* drive a file is on even when it is in a bag. Network shares should be opt-in, because a slow NFS mount can stall a scan.
Include folders. Less relevant. On Windows, non-NTFS volumes needed explicit folder-based indexing. On macOS the local volumes are all APFS or HFS+ and get walked the same way, so there is nothing to add by hand.
Exclude filters. Still relevant, and mostly about not wasting index space on directories nobody searches by name — build output, dependency folders, caches. The honest default is to index almost everything and let the search syntax narrow, because a file excluded from the index is a file the tool will swear does not exist.
Folder sizes. Everything could compute and index directory sizes. It is expensive on any filesystem, because a folder's size means summing everything underneath it, and it goes stale immediately. Most Mac tools skip it; Finder's Calculate All Sizes is the built-in equivalent and is slow for the same reason.
There is one setting Everything never needed: whether to index system folders.
Windows users search C:\Windows about as often as never, but nothing stops them. On macOS, /System and much of /Library are protected by System Integrity Protection, which means a scan will be *denied* on thousands of directories no matter what permissions you grant. That produces alarming "couldn't read 1,154 folders" messages about folders nobody wanted.
So the sensible Mac default is to leave system folders out, index everything a person actually owns, and make it a single explicit toggle for the people who do want /System/Library in results.
Everywhere indexes all mounted local volumes, keeps records for unplugged ones, skips network shares unless asked, and asks once during setup whether to include system folders. The same question is in Settings afterwards, and turning it off hides those results immediately rather than waiting for a rescan.
Usually no. They are large, protected by SIP, and almost never what you are looking for. Turn it on if you work with system frameworks.
System Integrity Protection blocks reads of certain paths even with Full Disk Access granted. Those folders can never be read by any app, so counting them as failures is misleading.
Yes, and the usual candidates are build directories and caches. Be sparing — an excluded folder is one the search will tell you is empty.
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