Tool · 2026 · Live
Scry
Whole-disk file search for Windows. Finds any file by name in about a millisecond, forgives typos, and looks inside your documents too.
Scry
Whole-disk file search for Windows. Finds any file by name in about a millisecond, forgives typos, and looks inside your documents too.
What it does
Press Alt+Shift+Space and a search box appears in the middle of the screen. Type, and files from every fixed drive come back while you type. A typo still finds the file (mian.rs finds main.rs). When no file name matches, Scry looks for the words inside your text files, Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents, and PDFs.
Filters like ext:pdf, in:C:\Projects or sort:size work in the box. If you’d rather not learn them, the chips under the query write them for you. The same engine is also a CLI and a Rust crate.
Why it exists
Scry started as a Windows port of Noah Dunnagan’s fsearch, which only runs on macOS. To scry is to see what is hidden. It was briefly called wsearch, which clashed with WSearch, the name of the Windows Search service.
How fast
Measured on my laptop, with 5.08 million files and folders on C: and Defender on:
| a file by name, one word | 0.5 ms |
| with a typo | 1.2 ms |
| words inside files, warm cache | 2-10 ms |
| a new, renamed or deleted file shows up | about 0.1 s |
| first crawl of the disk | 50-80 s, once |
It stays current by watching every drive root. After a restart it reads the NTFS change journal, which works without admin rights, to catch up in well under a second instead of rescanning the disk.
Status
Released: x64 and ARM64, a per-user installer that needs no admin rights, MIT licensed. The builds are not code-signed yet, so Windows SmartScreen asks you to confirm the first run. Every release is built by GitHub Actions, never on my machine, and ships with SHA-256 checksums.