Everything File Search

What the Everything File Search MCP server does

Everything File Search exposes voidtools Everything to MCP-compatible clients. It is designed for Windows systems where Everything maintains an index of files and folders. Instead of walking directories recursively, the server sends queries to Everything's es.exe command-line interface and returns matching paths or related file information.

The server supports ordinary filename searches as well as filters for extensions, paths, sizes, dates, attributes, regular expressions, whole-word matching, and case sensitivity. Everything's query language also supports categories such as duplicate filenames and empty folders. Some query functions, including content searches and certain metadata filters, may require Everything to inspect candidate files on disk rather than rely only on indexed values.

How it works

The MCP process runs locally and communicates with the client over the standard server definition shown in the project documentation. Each search is passed to es.exe, which queries the active Everything index. The default search result limit is 50, while the server supports an offset for pagination and a configurable hard cap for results.

Searches can be ordered by name, path, size, modification date, creation date, or extension. Creation-date filtering depends on the corresponding Everything index setting. On Everything 1.4, the server restricts some slow functions when the query would examine too many candidates; adding a path, extension, or filename term can narrow the operation. Everything may block other searches while it evaluates these disk-based functions.

Setup and configuration

Everything File Search MCP server requires Windows, an installed and running copy of voidtools Everything, and es.exe. The command-line tool is included with Everything 1.5 alpha or can be installed separately through the documented package managers or a release download. Python 3.10+ or uv is also required. The recommended launch command is uvx everything-mcp; installing the package with pip is another option.

The standard client configuration starts uvx with everything-mcp as its argument. A pip installation can instead use the everything-mcp executable or invoke the Python module directly. Claude Code also supports the provided plugin installation command.

The server auto-detects es.exe, but EVERYTHING_ES_PATH can specify its location. EVERYTHING_INSTANCE selects a named Everything instance, and EVERYTHING_MAX_RESULTS_CAP changes the maximum result limit; its default is 1,000. The instance variable should only be set when a named instance was explicitly configured in Everything.

Tools and capabilities

• everything_search runs general Everything queries with sorting, pagination, result limits, and match modifiers.
• everything_search_by_type searches categories including audio, video, images, documents, code, archives, executables, fonts, 3D files, and data.
• everything_find_recent finds files changed within periods from one minute through one year, optionally limited by path, extension, or query.
• everything_file_details returns metadata for one to 20 paths. For directories it can include item counts and listings; for text files it can return the first requested lines.
• everything_count_stats reports matching-file counts and can include total size and an extension breakdown without listing every result.

Limitations and notes

This server is Windows-specific and depends on Everything and es.exe; it is not a standalone filesystem indexer. Search quality and available date or attribute filters depend on Everything's index configuration. Content, image-dimension, music-tag, and some date, attribute, or size queries can be slow because they may read files from disk. The server may refuse broad slow searches and report the candidate count instead of executing them.

The benchmark in the project compares an es.exe query with a recursive walk of C:\, but its reported timings are environment-specific rather than a guarantee for every installation.