If Windows search drives you crazy, these 3 apps are a much better choice

On macOS, you can instantly look up files and launch apps with Spotlight search. Even many popular Linux distros offer snappy search bars like Spotlight. But on Windows, there is no central interface to search for every file, setting, and app. File Explorer takes forever to load searches, the Start search doesn’t always give relevant suggestions, if at all. Most of the time, it just plugs into Bing web results or displays ads for Microsoft products. We can’t fix Windows search, but we can replace it with a better option.

Everything search is lightning fast

Everything is a free app that can index and search Windows files instantly. Its index is constantly updating, so even the most recent files show up in search right away. I have Everything search installed on every Windows machine I own. You can start by downloading Everything installer from Voidtools and installing it. Make sure you select ‘Install Everything Service’ and the App Data folder for the location before proceeding. Launch Everything once it’s installed and wait a few moments while the app finishes indexing your drives.

Just start typing when the app is ready and the results will instantly appear as you type. If there are too many results, you can filter using file types. You can also make sure the results match the case or the entire word. Under the view tab, you can enable a preview pane for previewing files without opening them. There is a bookmark feature that lets you pin files and folders to the menu bar for quickly accessing repeated searches.

PowerToys Run is a macOS Spotlight alternative

Microsoft PowerToys is a suite of free and open-source enhancements for Windows. PowerToys Run is a quick launcher packaged with PowerToys that brings all the features of macOS Spotlight search to Windows. You just need to install PowerToys on your machine (available for free at the Microsoft Store and the official GitHub repo) and configure a launch hotkey. If you don’t mind opening the Command Prompt terminal, you can simply paste in this command, and it’ll automatically download and install PowerToys for you.

winget install --id Microsoft.PowerToys --source winget

When it’s done installing, PowerToys will automatically launch and drop you on the dashboard. Scroll through the list of tools and find PowerToys Run. Open its settings and make sure it’s enabled. Here you can configure an activation shortcut for PowerToys Run. By default, it’s Alt+Space, and it works anywhere on the Windows interface by instantly shifting focus to PowerToys Run.

You can look up files, folders, applications, and Windows settings. The results appear as soon as you start typing. To filter results, you can start a query with ‘?’ to get only get files and folders, or begin with a dot to only surface applications, and a dollar sign to search for Windows settings. You can tab through the results to open the files in Explorer, open them in the console, or run apps as an Administrator with a single key press. Plus, you perform quick unit or currency conversions and do calculations right within the PowerToys Run bar. Begin the query with ‘//’ to quickly launch the search in your default browser or open a URL in a new browser window.

PowerToys also includes an updated version of PowerToys Run called the Command Palette which is prettier and intuitive, but it’s still in early stages of development.

Get Flow Launcher for a beautiful interface

Flow Launcher is yet another Spotlight or PowerToys Run alternative, except it’s more feature-rich and powerful thanks to extensive plugin support. The plugin support makes this search app more modular and lightweight, but the vanilla version should suffice for most people. It’s just as fast as Everything, but it goes beyond simple file and folder searches. You can use Flow Launcher to launch applications, be it system apps or user apps. You can even search within system apps and system settings by prefixing the search query with an ‘s.’

This app hooks into your default browser too, allowing you to open URLs, run web searches, and even flip through your saved browser bookmarks. Simply type ‘b’ before the query to look through your browser bookmarks. There are similar shortcuts for searching for specific websites too, including Wikipedia (loaded with ‘wiki), Twitter, Maps, YouTube, DuckDuckGo and more.

By default, Flow Launcher can also execute commands through the Command Prompt shell. Just type ‘>’ and press the space bar once to start entering your commands. There’s even a built-in process killer that lets you force quit apps without launching Task Manager.

The best part about using Flow Launcher is its extensive plugin library, which can make Flow Launcher a lot more powerful than it already is. A plugin can be as simple as a toggle for quickly turning dark mode on and off or as complex as a robust manager for your Notion projects. You can browse the library on Flow Launcher’s website and add plugins you like by running their installation commands within Flow Launcher. Alternatively, you can open Flow Launcher settings and install plugins directly from the plugin store.

You can also personalize the Flow Launcher interface with themes, fonts, and backgrounds. There is a community theme store on GitHub where you can download Flow Launcher themes that other users have shared.

Windows search has been awfully slow for as long as I can remember, but the newer versions of Windows made it worse with ads and prioritized Bing searches. It’s time to ditch it for good and take back control of how you search and launch stuff on your computer.