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es-search

A Claude Code skill that turns Everything into Claude's default file-search tool on Windows. With this skill installed, Claude reaches for es.exe instead of Get-ChildItem -Recurse or the Glob tool whenever it needs to locate files by name, extension, size, date, attributes, or duplicates.

Why

Get-ChildItem -Recurse and the built-in Glob tool walk the filesystem every time. On large drives that takes seconds to minutes. Everything indexes the NTFS MFT and answers in milliseconds regardless of how many files you have. This skill teaches Claude the full Everything search syntax plus the CLI quirks needed to use it correctly from PowerShell.

Requirements

• Windows 10 or later
• Everything running with its indexing service
• Everything Command-line Interface (es.exe) on PATH — version 1.1.0.37 or later (earlier builds have no JSON output and use the removed -o / -offset pagination)
• Claude Code installed

Get es.exe from the voidtools/ES GitHub releases (pick the x64 zip on 64-bit Windows) and extract it onto your PATH — e.g. %LOCALAPPDATA%\Microsoft\WindowsApps.

Verify the CLI is reachable:

es -version

You should see 1.1.0.37 (or newer) and exit code 0.

Tip. The more indexing options you enable in Everything (Tools → Options... → Indexes), the more search capabilities become available to this skill — broader index scope and more filters answering instantly.

Installation

Drop the SKILL.md file into Claude's skills directory:

%USERPROFILE%\.claude\skills\es-search\SKILL.md

Claude Code auto-discovers skills under ~/.claude/skills/. Restart your session if it was already running.

What it covers

The skill documents and gives idiomatic PowerShell examples for:

• Name / wildcard / regex / extension filters
• Boolean operators (AND / OR / NOT / grouping) with the critical argv-tokenization rule (the single biggest pitfall when calling es.exe from PowerShell)
• Path scoping (-path, -parent, path:, -p) — including the bare-drive-letter pitfall: -path D: means that drive's current directory, not the drive (-path "D:\" does), and it under-reports silently
• Size, date (modified / created / accessed), and attribute filters
• Duplicate discovery (dupe:, sizedupe:, dmdupe:, attribdupe:)
• Sorting, viewport pagination, aggregates (-get-result-count, -get-total-size, -get-folder-size)
• Output formats (JSON / CSV / TSV / EFU / TXT / M3U8) with column-behavior notes — JSON is the preferred format for parsing via ConvertFrom-Json
• Match modifiers: case (-i), whole-word (-w), diacritics (-a), prefix / suffix, ignore punctuation / whitespace
• Case-sensitivity gotcha (-i means match-case, the opposite of POSIX grep -i)
• empty: vs size:0 distinction (empty folders vs zero-byte files)
• Media-metadata caveats (audio tags work only when indexed; image dimensions / file properties require additional configuration)
• Exit-code interpretation and graceful fallback to Glob / Get-ChildItem when Everything is unavailable

Every rule and example in SKILL.md has been empirically verified against es.exe 1.1.0.37 / Everything 1.4.1.1024.

What it does NOT do

• Content search inside files (use Claude's Grep tool — Everything's content: syntax exists but bypasses the index and is slow)
• Cross-platform search (es.exe is Windows-only; Glob is the fallback on macOS / Linux)
• Anything Everything isn't indexing (network shares not added to its index, removable media, etc.)

See also

• The full skill specification: SKILL.md
• es.exe source & releases: https://github.com/voidtools/ES
• Everything search syntax: https://www.voidtools.com/support/everything/searching/
• Everything CLI reference: https://www.voidtools.com/support/everything/command_line_interface/
• Claude Code skills documentation: https://docs.claude.com/en/docs/claude-code/skills

License

MIT