Changing the Everything filter

General discussion related to "Everything".
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void
Developer
Posts: 15353
Joined: Fri Oct 16, 2009 11:31 pm

Changing the Everything filter

Post by void »

The default Everything filter can be changed to exclude certain files/folders.





To change your Everything filter to exclude files/folders:
  • In Everything, from the Search menu, click Organize filters....
  • Select Everything and click Edit....
  • Change the Search to filter out the desired files/folders.
  • For example, to exclude C:\Program Files, C:\Program Files (x86), C:\Windows, db files and tmp files, change the Search to:
    !"c:\program files\" !"c:\program files (x86)\" !c:\windows\ !*.db !*.tmp
  • Click OK.
  • Click OK.
The Everything filter is the default filter.
Double clicking an active filter in the status bar will activate the default Everything filter.
Instead of using the Everything filter, you may wish to create your own exclude filter:
  • In Everything, from the Search menu, click Add to filters....
  • Change the Name to:
    No Nonsense
  • Change the Search to:
    !"c:\program files\" !"c:\program files (x86)\" !c:\windows\ !*.db !*.tmp
  • Click OK.
Filters can be activated from the Search menu, Filter bar (View -> Filters), right clicking the status bar, filter macro or filter keyboard shortcut.

To change the default filter:
  • In Everything, from the Tools menu, click Options.
  • Click the Home tab on the left.
  • Change Filter to the desired default filter.
  • Click OK.

If you change the Everything filter, to create a new filter to show all files:
  • In Everything, from the Search menu, click Add to filters....
  • Change the Name to: Really Everything
  • Change the Search to:
    (Leave the search blank)
  • Click OK.




To completely exclude files/folders from your index, please see Index -> Exclude.
Changing the Index Exclude List or toggling the exclude list will cause a rebuild, which can be slow.
Changing the Everything filter is fast and can be toggled instantly.
jhsgalaxy
Posts: 6
Joined: Sat Mar 18, 2023 9:04 pm

Re: Changing the Everything filter

Post by jhsgalaxy »

Sorry, there still is a slight misunderstanding.
I do not wish to exclude whatever folder (named "sample") from indexing. That would be easy to do.

What I want is in a specific search, e.g. inside my musics folder
... to find all the files (of every type) BUT any further folders inside this structure,
since I don't need to see whatever folders in the results list when I am looking for a file.
I only want to see the files (of all types)

Unfortunately, every search for "everything" also includes all the damn folders (which is useless, at least for me)
Therefore I'd like to be able to exclude 'folders' in general with specific file-searches.

Kinda the same applies to excluding all *.exe files or all *doc fies ... the question is, how to excludes specific types of possible results?
I can type this and that together with ! *.exe and e.g. ! *.ini to exclude files with certain endings, but how to do that with 'folders' in general?
For You to comprehend, I have a folder called interpetes. Sometimes I am looking for a song title but do not know what artist it was, and whether it is an audio or a tab or a pdf or a midi file and so on. So I have to look for "everything".
However, I do not need to see all my thousand folders of artists to find the file with the world "band" in it or similar.
Therefore I want to exclude 'folders' to be shown in the results .

I hope I could express myself better now.
Thank you in advance
void
Developer
Posts: 15353
Joined: Fri Oct 16, 2009 11:31 pm

Re: Changing the Everything filter

Post by void »

What I want is in a specific search, e.g. inside my musics folder
... to find all the files (of every type) BUT any further folders inside this structure,
since I don't need to see whatever folders in the results list when I am looking for a file.
I only want to see the files (of all types)
Please try the following filter:
  • In Everything, from the Search menu, click Add to filters....
  • Change the Name to: Music
  • Change the Search to: "D:\My Music Folder\" !folder:
    (where D:\My Music Folder is your music folder)
  • Click OK.
!folder: = NOT folders.


Kinda the same applies to excluding all *.exe files or all *doc fies ... the question is, how to excludes specific types of possible results?
I can type this and that together with ! *.exe and e.g. ! *.ini to exclude files with certain endings, but how to do that with 'folders' in general?
! = NOT
Please make sure there's no space after the !

For example:

!*.exe
-or-
!ext:exe;ini

folders: = match folders
!folders: = exclude folders.
jhsgalaxy
Posts: 6
Joined: Sat Mar 18, 2023 9:04 pm

Re: Changing the Everything filter

Post by jhsgalaxy »

Thanx a lot, that had helped me very much in more than only one point :D
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