There was something that caused me a great deal of confusion when I started using Everything that IMO should be mentioned as the VERY FIRST THING (or close to it) in any help that is provided for search syntax.
By default, Everything puts the * (asterisk) wildcard at the beginning and end of what you type when you enter a search, but if you explicitly include a wildcard it does NOT do this. So for example if I type in foobar it will find all files that contain foobar anywhere in the filename, but if I type in foobar* it will only find files that start with foobar.
Continuing with this example, I found it very strange when I typed in foobar and got a list of files, that this list would then get reduced to a shorter list when I added * at the end. I didn't come to understand the EXACT reason that this was happening until sometime later (via an AI query - I think this AI stuff is going to catch on!![:)]( "Smile")
) It is BRILLIANT and extremely useful that it works this way but it wasn't until I understood exactly what was going on here that the full power of the search algorithm became apparent and less confusing.
I would suggest that an explanation of how this works appear in the top item of this pinned help topic, and added to the top of the "Help > Search Syntax" menu item.
By default, Everything puts the * (asterisk) wildcard at the beginning and end of what you type when you enter a search, but if you explicitly include a wildcard it does NOT do this. So for example if I type in foobar it will find all files that contain foobar anywhere in the filename, but if I type in foobar* it will only find files that start with foobar.
Continuing with this example, I found it very strange when I typed in foobar and got a list of files, that this list would then get reduced to a shorter list when I added * at the end. I didn't come to understand the EXACT reason that this was happening until sometime later (via an AI query - I think this AI stuff is going to catch on!
) It is BRILLIANT and extremely useful that it works this way but it wasn't until I understood exactly what was going on here that the full power of the search algorithm became apparent and less confusing.I would suggest that an explanation of how this works appear in the top item of this pinned help topic, and added to the top of the "Help > Search Syntax" menu item.
Statistics: Posted by fhbutler — Mon Jun 01, 2026 4:42 pm
