Search
⌘F puts the cursor in the search field. Results appear while you type, in the pane, and a filter bar opens above them.
Where the text is looked for
Search In has three settings:
- Name: file and folder names. The app walks the folder itself, nearest items first, and shows hits as it finds them; the count at the right says how many items it has checked.
- Contents: the text inside documents, through Spotlight. This works only on volumes Spotlight indexes, and the count says "Searching with Spotlight…" while it runs.
- Everything: both, merged. A badge on each result says where the text matched.
The prefixes name: and content: narrow by both at once: name:*.pdf content:invoice finds PDF files whose text contains "invoice".
Scope is This Folder or Include Subfolders. A deep search stays on its own volume: it does not walk into other disks or into shares that are mounted inside the folder.
Filters
- Kind: Any Kind, Folders, Documents, Images, Videos, Audio, Archives.
- Date: Any Date, Today, This Week, This Month, This Year, Older Than a Year (the modification date).
- Size: Any Size, < 1 MB, 1–10 MB, 10–100 MB, 100 MB – 1 GB, > 1 GB.
- Match (names only): Plain Text or Regex. In Plain Text the wildcards
*and?work as they do in the shell. Letters match whatever their accents and whichever way the accent is encoded, so "resume" finds "résumé". - Tags: one or more of the colour tags; an item must carry all the tags you tick.
- In Archives: also look inside the zip, tar and other archives met on the way, up to 200 MB each. Inside an archive only names can be searched.
A regular expression that could run forever on some name gives up on that name after 50 ms, so a bad pattern slows the search down instead of hanging it.
Results
Group shows the results as one list (No Grouping), under their folders (By Folder), or by where the text matched (By Match, for Everything searches). The list has a Where column with each item's folder.
A double-click opens a result as it would in its folder; Open in New Tab, Quick Look and the rest of the context menu work on results too. New Folder and New Document stay available and select the new item.
A search that finds more than the app can show stops at the cap and says "refine your search". Closing the tab or the window stops a running search.