Comparisons
These are not competing implementations of the same idea. They are answers to different questions, which is why one feels broken to people used to the other.
Everything indexes filenames, exhaustively. Spotlight indexes content and metadata, selectively.
Everything answers "what is called this?". Spotlight answers "what is about this?". Both are reasonable; neither substitutes for the other.
| Everything | Spotlight | |
|---|---|---|
| Indexes | filenames and paths | content, metadata, some filenames |
| Coverage | every file on the volume | excludes ~/Library, packages, .noindex |
| Results | all matches, listed | ranked, truncated |
| First index | ~1 second | tens of minutes |
| Query style | operators | natural language plus some operators |
| Content search | 1.5 only, slow | yes, and good |
| Unmounted drives | remembered | forgotten |
Three specific things, in the order people hit them.
Results are ranked, not listed. Spotlight shows what it thinks you meant. If you know there are eleven files called config.json and you want to see all eleven, ranking is not a feature. Everything showed you all eleven and let you narrow.
Exclusions are invisible. ~/Library holds application support data, mail, and container folders — real files people genuinely need. Spotlight does not index it, and it does not tell you it did not. The result is an app that answers "no such file" about a file that is plainly there.
Filename matches lose to content matches. Search report and you get documents *containing* the word before the file *named* it. For content search that ordering is right. For finding a file you named yourself, it is backwards.
Content search. Everything's 1.5 content mode reads file bodies on demand and is slow; Spotlight has already read and indexed them. If your question is "the PDF that mentions the Henderson contract", Spotlight is the correct tool and no filename index will help.
It also understands file metadata deeply — camera model, duration, page count — which a filename index knows nothing about.
Use both, for their own jobs. Spotlight for "the document about X" and for launching apps. A complete filename index for "the file called X", for anything in ~/Library, and for anything on a drive that is currently unplugged.
That is the division Windows users already had, with Everything alongside Windows Search. Most of the frustration on macOS comes from expecting one tool to be both.
Not reliably. Removing it from the privacy exclusion list does not make it index, because much of the exclusion is built into the indexer rather than configurable.
It is not designed for it. Filename matches are blended with content matches and ranked together, which is correct for research and wrong for retrieval.
If Spotlight finds what you need, no. The gap only shows up when you search for files by name, or in the places Spotlight skips.
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