Search Beyond The Spotlight
Unhappy with Spotlight because it does not find files that you know to be there? Use FAF to find every file on your disks, including those usually hidden. By file name, date, size, and even plain text content (including RTF, Word and Excel files, but not PDF files – see note below).
• Recover a file whose name you partially remember?
• See what files got changed in the past 5 minutes?
• Find all the largest files on your disk?
• Uninstall software that leaves files in hidden places where Spotlight doesn't look?
• Search with regular expressions?
Find Any File (FAF) is the perfect tool for these tasks.
You can even search on disks that are not indexed by Spotlight, including network server (NAS) volumes.
Find Any File can find files that Spotlight doesn't, e.g. those inside bundles and packages, and inside system folders that are usually excluded from Spotlight search.
Contrary to Spotlight, it does not use a database but instead searches the data on disk directly. This lets you search for file properties such as name, creation and modification dates, file size, even plain text inside files, but also makes it slightly slower. However, since FAF now includes Spotlight results where possible, you'll still get such results as quickly as with Spotlight search in Finder.
Another useful feature is its hierarchical results view (see screenshots). It lets you view the found items within their respective folders, making it often much easier to browse through 100s of found items.
•• Note about text search inside files ••
FAF can search file content only in plain (unformatted and RTF) and in zip-compressed text files (as used by Word and Excel for instance), and with less freedom than what Spotlight search offers in this regard. For instance, limit your search to single words, and use several "Text content" rules if you look for multiple words in a file. Also, while it's not as fast as Spotlight, it's still much faster than using Unix tools such as grep, because FAF uses all available CPUs for the search concurrently.
For finding text in PDF and other files that encode or compress the text in other formats, FAF can still find text in them, provided that Spotlight has indexed the files, because FAF includes Spotlight results by default.
•• Here's what users say about FAF ••
“FAF goes where Spotlight's can't easily reach.”
“As the administrator for about 50 school Macs, I often need to look for some file misplaced by a novice or, while troubleshooting a system, I often need to search for obscure operating system files. Find Any File is in my arsenal of tools when things files or folders go astray.”
“I use it when I want to find a specific kind of file or to see and eliminate or compare the double and redundant files. I surely use it 4-5 times a week.”
“I keep FAF as an icon in the toolbar of every Finder window. When I have to actually find something, I use FAF instead of the Finder.”
This app has not received enough ratings or reviews to display an overview.
Used this for many months - so a considered review
Robw1962
I've used this for many months on all my Macs so this is a more considered review than a quick love it or hate it.I have never got on with the Macs built in search and consider it useless, so have been looking around for a better search for years. Just to be clear "Find Any File" is not it :) However it's a very specific search tool, which when used in the right way, is very powerful and far superior and easier to use than the mac tools. Its basically the Unix find command reskinned. However thats no bad thing, I've been using find for over 30 years and I still have to look at the manual when using it for anything beyond simple tasks. It hides the complexity of find and presents everything in a pretty simple and intuitive way. It doesn't precalculate databases so doesn't take up much space, this is good becuase it means you can do things like check whats changed in the last five minutes and bad because it can take a long time to complete a search. Thats understandable when you think how it works. It has to scan the disk to do what you want for *most* searches. Its staying on my disk as it does what is supposed to do very well, it doesn't try to be a Spotlight replacement. If you understand how it works (basically understand find), you'll find (pun intended) this to be a valuable and usefull app.
Life Saver
bvb_london
My Excel 2015 just froze (endless color wheel dismay) and I had to force quit. Despite having autorecovery on it hadn’t saved any changes automatically and the file opened without the work of the last 2 hours. I almost puked of anger. I tried all the stuff like “unhide library and look in application support”, googled blogs (turns out I am not the only one being highly frustrated) etc.Finally found the tip to use this program to find hidden files. Searched for .xls created i last 2h - and voila, it found some cryptic file with the ~ wavy symbol. Double clicking couldn’t open it. Luckily I remembered reading about changing file type from .xsls to .xslb. Could open, all there, night saved, huuuuge relief.Bottom line: without this program I would have never found the file.I first downloaded trial but after it successfully helped me I purchased this versoin to support the author.
Exceptional app
LondonGirl29...andabit
I have relied on this app to help me find multiple files, documents and presentations from the last ten years as a teacher. It has been invaluable to me, when I can only remember a rough idea of the filename or a phrase that I might have used in a lesson from 7 years ago - it has saved me hours of rebuilding resources for school when I know I have worked on it before! It is truly an example of working smarter, not harder. I wish this was a standard install on all computers.The only downside I would mention is that due to the intensity of a text content search or similar, it can slow down your processing speed, even on a brand new Mac.
A stunning app!
GC_wales
Wow. I stumbled across FAF when searching for solutions to poor Spotlight indexing on external drive-hosted user accounts. This app was mentioned as a workaround.It has since become a Spotlight/Alfred replacement for me as it can find the proverbial needle in a haystack!! It runs off a global Hotkey too. I’ve never known anything like it, and it’s so powerful, I have barely scratched the surface. (Refreshing too, to have a buy-once price, rather than yet another subscription – thank you.)
• Double clicking the divider of a result list's header (where you can also drag-change the width of the column) now adjusts the column width automatically.
• Fixes loading of .paths files that contain the search info in JSON format.
• Fixes the rule "Calculate folder sizes" where it would show "-" for searched directories, especially when also including results from Spotlight.
• Fixes arranging of result columns that use "*" in their width fields, generated by FAF v1 or set manually.
• Fixes saving results in JSON format.
Version 2.6.1
The developer, Thomas Tempelmann, indicated that the app’s privacy practices may include handling of data as described below. For more information, see the developer’s privacy policy .
Data Not Linked to You
The following data may be collected but it is not linked to your identity:
Usage Data
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Accessibility
The developer has not yet indicated which accessibility features this app supports. Learn More
