sgcFSearch: Free Whole-Disk File Search for Windows, Results While You Type

QA measurements on one PC with a Release build: a first crawl of C: with 3,404,349 files and 447,577 folders. Your numbers depend on the disk, the CPU and the number of files.

You know the file exists. You just do not know where it is. sgcFSearch is a free whole-disk file search tool for Windows that ends the hunt. Press Alt+Shift+Space anywhere, start typing, and the results appear on every keystroke, best matches first, out of millions of files.

One small tray app owns the index. The search bar, the sgcfs command line and your own tools all ask it the same questions, so every client sees the same results. It runs from a normal user account, it indexes every fixed drive, and it reads the NTFS change journal through the unprivileged interface, so it never asks for administrator rights. sgcFSearch is written in Delphi by eSeGeCe, and it is free. The only thing it carries in return is a small “made by esegece.com” line in the search bar.

Watch sgcFSearch find files while you type. Also on YouTube.

Results on Every Keystroke

The search bar shows results as you type, with file icons and the matched letters highlighted. Enter opens the file and Ctrl+Enter shows it in its folder. Every word you type must match the file or folder name, in any case, and the words can come in any order.

The ranking learns from you. Results are scored by match quality and folder depth, and the files you open or copy move up. Each use counts half as much after 14 days, so old habits fade out on their own.

One Wrong Letter Is Fine

A word of 5 letters or more also matches with one error: a missing, extra or different letter, or two neighbour letters swapped. So confgi finds config.json and raport finds report.pdf. Typo matches get the lowest match tier, so they normally rank below the exact ones.

Narrow It Down With a Click

The Type, Modified, Size, In folder and Sort chips write filters such as type:images or mtime:week into the query for you. A filter you type by hand lights up its chip too. The bar also remembers your last 50 searches: with an empty box, Up brings them back.

Search Inside Your Files

File names are only half the story. grep:TODO lists the lines that contain the text, in the files under your content folders, which are your user folder by default. regex: matches a regular expression and sym: finds where a symbol is defined. When no file name matches at all, sgcFSearch looks inside the files on its own.

The content index is a trigram index of the text in your content folders. It reads plain text and source code, Word, Excel and PowerPoint files without Office installed, OpenDocument files, and PDF through the Windows filters. Candidates are read again at search time, so results never come from stale data.

Always Current, Without Admin Rights

A Query Language That Stays Out of Your Way

Words and filters are separated by spaces, in any order. Modifiers pin a word to the start or the end of a name, and filters cover extension, type, kind, folder, path, size, modified date, regular expression, limit and sort. A few examples from the user guide:

The Same Index From a Terminal

sgcfs talks to the running app through the pipe and starts it in the background when needed. Paths go to stdout and the summary goes to stderr, so you can pipe the results straight into PowerShell. It has plain, long and JSON output, exit codes for scripts and a JSON lines bridge. This is a real session:

PS> sgcfs -n 8 notepad ext:exe
C:\Windows\notepad.exe
C:\Windows\SysWOW64\notepad.exe
C:\Windows\System32\notepad.exe
C:\Program Files\Notepad++\notepad++.exe
C:\Windows\WinSxS\wow64_microsoft-windows-notepad_31bf3856ad364e35_10.0.26100.9549_none_15298a72546c8c3f\notepad.exe
C:\Windows\WinSxS\wow64_microsoft-windows-notepad_31bf3856ad364e35_10.0.26100.8972_none_1501e9325489977a\notepad.exe
C:\Windows\WinSxS\amd64_microsoft-windows-notepad_31bf3856ad364e35_10.0.26100.9278_none_0af8678a1ff0a8d5\notepad.exe
C:\Windows\WinSxS\wow64_microsoft-windows-notepad_31bf3856ad364e35_10.0.26100.9549_none_15298a72546c8c3f\r\notepad.exe
12 results, 8 shown (16.14 ms)

PS> sgcfs bench
query           server ms   round trip    results
one word            13.79        14.25      21113
typo                12.91        13.39      21318
two words           12.65        13.14        670
filtered            11.92        12.44       2147
content grep        44.44        44.94        100
median of 20 runs per query, one connection

Run sgcfs bench on your own PC to see what your disk and CPU can do. Add --json to any search, for example sgcfs --json -n 2 kernel32.dll, and you get the raw JSON response with the path, size, modified time and score of every result.

Two Ways to Install

There are two downloads. The signed installer, sgcFSearch_setup.exe, installs per user, adds a Start menu entry and can start the app at login and put sgcfs on the PATH. The zip, sgcFSearch.zip, holds the signed sgcFSearch.exe and sgcfs.exe and the user guide for a manual installation: unzip the folder anywhere and run sgcFSearch.exe, then sgcfs install --login adds the same two entries and sgcfs uninstall removes them.

You need Windows 10 version 1809 (build 17763) or later, or Windows 11, 64-bit. Memory and disk grow with the number of files. With 3.4 million files the QA PC used 306 MB of memory and a 202 MB names.idx.

Questions or feedback? Get in touch, you will get a reply from the people who wrote the code.