Empty search bar has Everything showing every file on my hard drive

[jamesbritt]

I run Everything on three PCs (all Windows 10).

Usually, when I bring up Everything for a search, when the search bar is empty nothing is shown as match (which is what I would expect).

On my Surface Pro 6 today, when I launched Everything, with nothing in the search bar, it started showing what appeared to be every single file in the index, Over a million (according to the count at the bottom).

This happened after I rebooted the device and a Windows update was installed. It has Win 10 64bit Home, version 21H1, OS build 19043.1466

I updated Everything to version 1.4.1.1015 (x64) to see if that changed anything but it did not.

Is this a bug? A configuration option?

In practice I can still search and get the expected results, it's just odd that with no search terms it defaults to showing (ironically, I suppose) everything.

[therube]

Tools | Options | General -> Results ---> Hide results when the search is empty

(AFAIK, hiding results is not the default behavior. At least, I have always seen results.)

[jamesbritt]

It isn't a matter of hiding results, It's that with no search in the search bar I see every file that is indexed.

[NotNull]

That is by design. Everything shows all files and folders initially; entering a search in the search bar will limit the results to the files/folders that match. You can change the default behaviour as described by @therube.


I find the showing of all files very useful: when sorting by date modified (descending) you get a list of most recently changed files. Or using the out-of-the-box sorting by run-count (descending) gives you a list of most frequently used files/folders.
In about one third of the cases I now can find what I was looking for without typing a single letter .

[void]

Showing all results when the search is empty doesn't consume any noticeable RAM/CPU.

It can be useful to sort by Date Modified to find recently changes files.