Comparisons
EasyFind has been the free answer to Spotlight's gaps for two decades. It deserves the comparison.
DEVONtechnologies' free searcher. No index: every search reads the directory tree live. It searches names or contents, includes invisible files and package interiors, supports boolean operators and wildcards, and costs nothing.
it finds, including inside packages
Time, linearly with disk size. A full-disk name search on a large SSD runs seconds to minutes; each new query starts over. Casual use — the dozens-of-times-a-day lookups — does not survive that latency, and tools that are slow stop being reached for.
No index also means no instant size/date filtering across the disk, and nothing at all for unmounted drives.
The index inverts the cost: ~31 seconds once, then keystroke-time answers forever, kept current by FSEvents. Offline volumes stay searchable. The price is $19, a resident process, and 300-odd MB of mapped index.
| Want | Use |
|---|---|
| Free, occasional, exhaustive | EasyFind |
| Constant, instant, filterable | Everywhere |
| Content search too | EasyFind (live) or Spotlight |
| Unplugged drives | Everywhere |
Genuinely reasonable: an index for daily speed, EasyFind as the free second opinion when you want a live read of the disk with no index in between. They disagree only about latency, and both are right about their own use case.
Yes — DEVONtechnologies distributes it free.
It searches live with no index, reading the directory tree on every query — the price of always-current completeness.
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