The Explorer plugin is a default plugin that installs with Flow Launcher and is used to search for files and folders on your filesystem. You can now choose which search engine will search for what type of item through Flow. You can use the built-in Windows Search Index which is default and is part of the Windows operating system or you can use a popular third-party tool called Everything. Everything tends to be a faster search and offers more search options than Windows Index however you do need to download and install it to use it. If you don't already have Everything installed, Flow will automatically download and install it if you choose it as your search index engine. To trigger automatic install, fire a search and click the "Warning: Everything is not running" result.
Here is how to configure this plugin:
- Use search result's location as the working directory of the executable : tick this so Flow will set the working directory of any application you run through the Explorer plugin to the directory of the executable
- Hit enter to open folder in Default File Manager : tick this box to have the ENTER key open the current directory in the default file manager rather than have Flow go into this directory for further browsing.
- File editor path and Folder editor path : These two options allow you to set a program to open either files or folders, when you right mouse click / SHIFT + ENTER context menu a search result. Note these options will only appear in the context menu if you have set them here. For example, to set up this plugin, so you can open any directory in Visual Studio Code, first add the path to your Visual Studio Code install in the Folder editor path setting:
then search for a folder, and then right mouse click / SHIFT + ENTER:
and then choose the Open With Editor option
- Shell path : set the executable shell to be launched when the right mouse click / SHIFT + ENTER is chosen. This defaults to the Windows
cmd - Index search engine, Content search engine and Directory recursive search engine: These three options let you choose whether Windows Index or Everything (if you have it installed) for specific tasks. The Index is for general filename search, the Content is for searching within text files and the Directory recursive is for listing subdirectories within a directory.
- Open Windows index option: this opens the Windows Indexing system setting, so you can see and adjust exactly what the Windows Index service is doing.
- Search full path : use the Everything option to search the full path and not just the filename. Equivalent to the
path:modifier within Everything. - Sort Option : dropdown list to show how the search results are sorted.
- Everything Path : If you have Everything installed, Flow Launcher will try and find the installation to use, but if you are having issues, or it is installed in a non-standard directory, you can specify it explicitly here.
NOTE If you let Flow download Everything for you, it will use version 1.4.1.1009. If you want to use the Everything 1.5 alpha branch you will need to do the following:
- Completely exit out of Everything (right-click the Everything system tray icon and click Exit)
- Open your Everything-1.5a.ini file in the same location as your Everything64.exe
- Add the following line to the end of the file:
alpha_instance=0 - Save changes and restart Everything.
Everything will no longer use an instance name for window classes (IPC). Everything will continue to use the 1.5a instance name for settings, data and the Everything Service. (source - Flow-Launcher/Flow.Launcher#1716)
- For each option here you can choose a custom keyword to trigger that specific type of search. Anything with a
*is searched for when you type anything in Flow Launcher or if you give the Explorer plugin a global keyword. For example, the default to search within documents is set todoc:(this is done as searching the contents of documents is slow and so should only trigger when that is definitely what you want to do). If you don't care about exactly what type of search is executed, just use the 'Search' keyword.
- Here you can add directories that you often work with, and would like to be returned as soon as you start typing their source location. Directories can also be added and removed from this list with the right mouse click / SHIFT + ENTER context menu from any search result that is a directory.
- Adding a directory here will exclude it from the Flow Launcher search, over-riding any settings you may have in Windows Indexing or Everything.
If you do choose to use Everything to search, these Everything commands may be useful to reference.