[thatgurjot]

Honestly, the story isn't that interesting. When I started I barely new JavaScript. Over the course of development, I learned Rust and TypeScript, and grappled with so many edge-cases and intricacies of NodeJS, SQLite, Tauri, Tantivy, and many other technologies. It was a great learning experience for me.

The original idea emerged from my workplace where everyone has thousands of documents on their machines but can't recall what's where, so they always ask each other for files, and then end up with several duplicates. It's a mess. I thought a natural language powered high-speed, low-footprint app would be a great USP, especially when you compare it against Windows Search.

Turned out, everyday office people (not nerdy hackers) have their own set ways of managing and discovering files on their machines. A guy I met keeps ONE 1000-page Word document instead of hundreds of smaller Word files because Ctrl+F in a Word document is more effective than Windows Search! Plus, a lot of files are now moving online to Google Drive or are locked behind Microsoft OneDrive, especially if it's a corporate workplace. Corporate work machines also made it quite impossible to install an app with that isn't code signed. So my target audience was kind of priced out for me!

I didn't start out to make an 'universal search app' but I fell for its allure somewhere along the way. I wanted to make a simple desktop search app that _just works_. Kind of like Everything [1] for Windows but full-text, cross-platform and less nerdy.

In the end, what I got was an app that fits my needs perfectly and I am really happy with it!

[1]: https://www.voidtools.com/

[Cotterzz]

Yep, you were onto something. Everything is so useful, almost vital now. If it were cross-platform and had a text-search option it would be perfect. I think the only other limitation is the columns for search and sort are but a handful. Though index and search would presumably be slower, so it would need to be optional.

[rukshn]

But the question that I wonder is, why even cross platform, online search tools, which search your google drive, one drive, dropbox and show results in one place, even tend to fail,

I have seen few startups even YC backed that didn't make it, I wonder why it's such a hard barrier to entry, even being a common problem everywhere

[akoboldfrying]

Everything plus massively long, descriptive filenames are the sweet spot that I'll never leave.

Want tags? Just stick the tag in the filename. Now it's a tag!

[bastijn]

Everything has text search. Either through advanced search menu or through content:”text” - though not an indexed search. Or did you mean OCR text search on images?

[djfobbz]

Kiddan paaji? "Everything" has been my go to as well for the last 8 years!