About Find Any File, version 2

Find Any File has a few gems that other search tools do not offer:

1. It offers a hierarchical view for the found items as an alternative to the common flat list view. You can switch to it using ⌘2 or click on the center segment of the "View" button at the top of the results window:

   For instance, this search revealed thousands of hits. If you'd look at that many results in a flat list, it would be hard to browse. In the hierarchical view you can directly look for the results in the folders that interest you.

   Also note that some rows are black (and bold) while others are gray (and cursive). The black ones are the ones you had searched for, whereas the gray ones are just there to show you the enclosing folders, without being direct hits.
2. You can filter the shown items further by their name, kind, enclosing folder etc. (see below).
3. You can save your entered searches to files (they'll have the extension ".faf"). You can then double click them in the Finder to have them start the search immediately, or use the saved search as a preset.
4. If you hold the option key (⌥) down in the Find window, the Find button turns into Find All. If you click on it then, you are asked for an administrator password - and then Find Any File will restart with root permissions, being able to find really any file on your Mac's local volumes (something that Spotlight won't ever do).

Have you just installed or launched a program for the first time and like to see what it modified or added to your disks? Here's a way to do that (it excludes .DS_Store files from the results because they're not really relevant to this question).

Search for multiple file extensions at once, like Word documents in both the old and the new format.

Searching for files only inside your Music folder that are neither in AAC nor in MP3 format and which are at least a megabyte in size? So you could enter two Name criteria as follows, along with a minimum size. Also note that the search is limited explicitly to the Music folder.

Or you might want to find all Numbers documents created in 2018 only.

You can also search for text content (plain text only, though, i.e. not in .docx, .xlsx or .pdf files, as they're usually compressed).

FAF lets you set up a complex set of rules if you like. Here is an overview of the properties you can look for. There are more verbs (operators) that are not shown. You can match your search term to just the start of end of a file name, exlude terms from names, specify a range of dates or file sizes (by using two rules, one with the lower and one with the upper bound), use regular expressions for file names and text file content, or look specifically for images, audio, video, plain and rich text types.

For a file or folder to be found, all non-empty rules must match. If you need an "either … or" condition, you either have to perform separate searches for them or use one of the "Name contains / ends in either of …" rules.

Currently, searching for specific tags is not possible yet, though you can search for any item with a label and then use the search filter in the Results window to see only the tags you like to find. See the FAQ on this.

Additional less frequently needed rules can be revealed by holding down the option (⌥) key when clicking onto the left popup menu.

To make them permanently visible, issue this command in Terminal.app:

defaults write org.tempel.findanyfile "Mode.Expert" -bool YES

Hot Key

See below for setting up a keyboard shortcut for lauching FAF quickly.

Dim Color

When using the hierarchical view, enclosing folders that are not part of the search are shown in this color so that they're easier to distinguish from the folders and files that match your search rules.

Expand all folders when showing results

Applies to the hierarchical view. If unchecked, only folders that have a single matching item inside will be opened.

Remember "Show…" choices in Results windows

If you like the "Invisibles", "Package Contents" and "Trashed" options to keep their settings instead of resetting to "Show" with each search, check this option.

Enable "Open Recent Search" menu

If you do not want FAF to remember your recent searches, uncheck this option.

Show Results Early

Opens the Results window as soon as items are found. You can then stop the search as soon as you see what you were looking for.

Include Spotlight results

By including Spotlight, items may appear sooner in the Results window. When searching for File Content, Spotlight may include text from rich text files that FAF otherwise would not find (because FAF can only search plain text). It also may speed up searches on NAS systems that support Spotlight (such as Synology's Universal Search, which you may have to explicitly enable on your NAS first). Note that FAF will keep searching until it has performed its own rigurous look at every file, meaning that even if Spotlight already delivered all possible results in the first seconds of the search, FAF will not finish faster, because it will still perform its own (usually slower) search to make sure nothing was missed. Therefore, this option is only useful for getting your results appear faster, and thereby only makes sense if you also have the option "Show Results Early" enabled.

Automatically check for updates

These options are only available in the FAF version downloaded from the FAF website but not when installed from the Mac App Store (MAS), as the App Store performs update checks on its own.

Special Folders…

See below for configuring folders that should be excluded from search.

Reset All

Click this to reset your preferences to the recommended defaults. Also clears your recent searches.

You can open the Special Folders settings from the Find Any File menu and from the Preferences window's same-named button. You can also use the shortcut ⌘⇧, (cmd-shift-comma).

Exclude

Check this option to have a folder or disk excluded from the results. An example is to exclude the Time Machine backup disk, so that it's not searched when choosing "on all disks" as the target.

Slow

Use this option for volumes that do not support the "fast search" (CatalogSearch, searchfs) correctly even if they report they would. This may be the case for NAS systems that are mounted via the AFP protocol, and which use an old implementation of netatalk. You'd check this option if you suspect that FAF does not find all the items it should on a network volume. With this option checked, the slow will be slower but should not be missing any items any more. Volumes not offering "fast search" won't show the Slow checkbox.

Deleted Items Remain Visible

When checked, if files are deleted by using FAF's Delete Immediately command, or when they got deleted by background processes, they remain visible in FAF's results windows, but with a strike-through line. To remove them from the results, use the Remove Deleted Items command.

Automatically Refresh

When checked, FAF will update the shown items if they get changed by other programs, e.g. if you modify, rename, move or delete a found item. On network volumes this may not always work, though. If unchecked, you can still use the Refresh command to force an update.

Available rules, including the "expert" rules that are only available when holding down the option (⌥) key.

Note: To fill the input field for a particular name, date, size, code or UTI, you can drag a file or folder into the rule's field.

Name

Matches file names.

Last modified date

Matches by the date the file or folder was last modified and stored on disk.

Created date

Matches by the date the file or folder was created on disk.

File size

Matches by the data fork size of the file, which is usually the size shown by the Finder (exception: If the file also has a resource fork, which is rare nowadays, that size is added to the size shown by Finder but not when searching by size in this program).

Resource size (hidden expert option)

Matches by the resource fork size, if it's present (rarely is).

Kind

Matches by a set of pre-defined file kinds: Image, Video, Audio, Text (including PDF, Pages and Word documents) and Plain Text (i.e. non-rich text such as .html and .txt files). If you like to have more file kinds available in this menu, please contact me. Note that this search is basically a shortcut of the expert rule "File Type UTI conforms to …" (see below), meaning I can only add kinds for which there's a UTI defined.

Label

Matches one of the 7 colors available as Tags. However, if a file or folder has more than one Tag of different color, a search will succeed only for one of the tag colors but not for the other(s). That's a limitation of how macOS has migrated Label colors into Tags, and FAF can't do much about this. If in doubt, see the FAQ for a work-around.

Is a folder

Lets you limit the search to either files (No) or folders (Yes).

Is a Finder Alias

Lets you limit the search to either regular files and folders (No) or Finder Aliases and symlinks (Yes).

Case sensitive names

If set to Yes, text entered into the Name, Path and Folder names rules has to match even in case, e.g. searching for "Name contains foo" won't find a file named "Foo".

Case sensitive content (hidden expert option)

If set to Yes, text entered into the File content rule has to match even in case, e.g. searching for "File content contains foo" won't find text files that contain "Foo" but not "foo".

File Type code (hidden expert option)

Matches the 4-letter codes used by Classic Mac OS files, such as slnk for symlink files.

Creator code (hidden expert option)

Matches the 4-letter codes used by Classic Mac OS files, such as MACS for files created by Finder.

Owner ID (hidden expert option)

Matches the Unix owner ID, such as 0 for files owned by root and 501 for the first user created on the system.

Group ID (hidden expert option)

Matches the Unix group ID.

Path

Matches the enclosing folder's path, e.g. "/System/Library/".

Folder names

Matches any of the folder names in which the to-be-found items resides. For example, to match files inside "/System/Library", both "Folder names is System" and "Folder names is Library" would work.

Negate conditions (hidden expert option)

Inverts what will be found. If set to Yes, all items that would not be matched by all other rules will then be considered a match.

Invisible items

Skips or hides hidden items from the results (if an entire disk is searched, they will still be found but not shown, whereas when searching a folder (or doing a "slow" search), such items will be skipped in the search, which may speed up the search process.

Package contents

Similar to Invisible items, but for Package (bundle) contents, including contents of applications.

Trashed contents

Similar to Invisible items, but for items inside the Trash.

Limit folder depth

Specifies how many folders deep the search should reach. A value of "1" finds only the immediate contents of the given start folder or volume. This also forces a "slow" search on searching entire volumes.

Limit amount

Limits the number of found items to the given number. Prevents the "Many items founds" confirmation dialog if the "Show Results Early" option is turned off.

Pass results (hidden expert option)

Lets you choose an application that will receive the found items instead of showing them in a Results window. Useful if you want to post process the found items in your own program, e.g. with AppleScript.

File content

Matches plain text content in files. The entered search string will be found inside files that contain the text in UTF-8 or UTF-16 format. This search won't find text inside many "rich text" files, such as .docx (Word), .xlsx (Excel) and PDF. However, if you allow Spotlight Results to be included in the results, then results from such rich text files may be included, provided Spotlight has indexed them before.

File Type UTI (hidden expert option)

Matches file types based on their UTI code. See here for commonly used UTI codes. You can find excact matches or confirming matches, which means that if you search for UTIs conforming to "public.archive", it'll find all kinds of archive files, including .zip, .tar and even .docx because Word documents have their contents compressed in zip archives.

Slow mode (hidden expert option)

Forces slow search on volumes (useful only to test whether the fast volume search is returning different results, which can happen if there's a bug in FAF or when searching on certain NAS and Linux systems).

contains

A "smart" search option, similar to the way Spotlight does it. For example, Name contains my voice finds file names such as "invoice for my car.doc" and "myvoice.mp3", i.e. any name that contains both "my" and "voice".

contains literally

Searches for an exact occurance of the entered text in a file name. For example, Name contains literally my voice finds "hear my voices.mp3", but not "invoice for my car.doc".

is

Finds file names that are exactly as typed. For example, Name is hosts finds files named "hosts", but not "hosts.txt" nor "ghosts".

begins with

Finds files whose name start with the entered text.

ends with

Finds files whose name end with the entered text. Note that this usually means that you're matching on the file extension of files. If you have disabled the option to not show all file extensions in the Advanced Finder Preferences, then you may see many files without extensions in Finder, but FAF sees them. For instance, applications won't show their ".app" extension, so if you want to find apps like "PhoneView" and "Preview" with FAF, searching for Name ends with view won't find them, but Name ends with view.app would.

does not contain

Names may not contain the entered text. This is not a "smart" option like contains is. So, if you want to exclude names that contain neither "foo" nor "bar", you have to add this rule twice, one with "foo" and one with "bar".

contains words

First, this option is "smart" like contains. That means entering "my voice" will look for both "my" and "voice" as words in the file names. Secondly, these words have to be accuring as true words in the file name, meaning that searching for Name contains words my voice finds "this is my voice" and "voice, oh my!" but not "my voices".

matches pattern

Performs a simple wildcard match where the asterisk ("*") stands for any number of characters. Examples: Name matches pattern foo*bar*.txt finds any names that begin with "foo", then contain "bar" and end with ".txt", such as "foobar.txt" and "foo is not barred.txt", but not "This is foo bar.txt" (for this, you'd have to search for *foo*bar*.txt).

contains either of

Lets you enter a set of alternatives ("or" operation), separated by spaces, of which at least one has to occur in the matched file names.

ends with either of

Lets you enter a set of alternatives ("or" operation), separated by spaces, of which at least one has to occur at the end in the matched file names. This is mainly useful for finding files that end in a set of extensions. For example, Name ends with either of .doc .docx finds both old and new Word documents.

matches regex

This lets you write complex search rules using regular expressions. You can use "^" and "$" to represent the start and end of the file name. FAF uses the system-supplied regex engine, which is "based on a heavily modified subset of TRE" (see "man regcomp") with the options REG_ENHANCED and REG_EXTENDED.

To search a custom set of disks or folders, simply drop them together onto the popup menu which lets you select where to search.

If you can't drag all the icons at once, you may also add them to an existing set by holding down the shift (⇧) key when dropping them onto the popup menu.

Use the filter in the flat (non-hierarchical) list to reduce the shown items to the text you enter. Use the menu under the magnifier glass to choose what column to filter on.

Right-click on the column titles to get a menu that lets you choose which columns appear in the list.

When Find Any File is launched, it always defaults to searching the boot volume. If you prefer to search a different volume by default, do this: Launch Find Any File, choose your preferred volume, then use the Save command to save the search criteria to a file. Next time, instead of launching Find Any File directly, open that saved file instead - Find Any File will launch with the presets you chose before.

Alternatively (since version 1.5), you can set up your preferred search and choose Save As Defaults from the File menu in order to have these settings reappear next time you launch Find Any File.

(Note: If you have saved a Search with the option to start the search automatically when opening the file, you can still prevent the search from starting by holding down the option (⌥) key while Find Any File opens the document.)