Noob Search 4+

Advanced search utility built on top of the macOS spotlight search, with a few extra features such as sub searches, filter and filter by filetypes.

Noob Search requests access to your folders and files when typing in file path to path input. This is required to be able to list files and folders for suggestions as well as granting access to searching files and folders. Noob Search does not collect or process your data in any way. This is only for Spotlight (macOS' built in search utility) to be able to search and give search results. Files can be accessed by clicking the folder icon next to search results which will open a finder window with the file selected. Noob Software does not collect or process any data about you.

Noob Search lets you filter out search results with keywords or by file types. Noob Search also lets you run sub searches from search results. Search results do not live-update so your search results are not disrupted while you are working with them. To update a search you must execute the search again. You can place multiple conditions and condition groups to build your query The star symbol (*) is used for wildcard. No restrictions are placed on the pairing of conditions and metadata-field that is searched by. So you must keep in mind what conditions/values are being used. For example using the greater than operator on a value that is only strings will not result in any items. This is done intentionally since values can vary.

You can drag locations from the finder to the location input then press enter or the plus button to add the location to your search paths.

You can add multiple search locations, the search field responds to keyboard arrow inputs for quickly selecting results and when you press "enter/return" on your keyboard you select a value from the suggestions when pressing "enter/return" again you select the location to the search. You can also press the plus sign next to the input field for locations to add locations to the search. You must select at least one search location to start a search. You are prompted by the app to grant access to the location when inputting location. It is considered safe to grant access to the entire system hard drive or other volumes, since the app does not create or edit files, it does not collect any data from you and the access is only used to provide suggestions for the location input and then for searching the locations. You will only need to select the location once, after that if you keep the app open you can freely search your location or sub locations without having to reselect them with the folder selector.

Search results appear with filename filetype and location, to navigate in the finder to a file press the folder icon next to the file path in the result item. You can filter items by typing in the filter field and filter file types by pressing display options and checking or unchecking file types in the file trees.

Note that Content Type search terms must be the full name of the content type for example: public.source-code for source code files. This is somewhat inconvenient since there is no mapping directly from content type name/id to file type extension. So you must know the content type name instead of the extensions you are searching for. If you need to search for filetypes by extension you can use wildcard then filetype for example to search for wav files: *.wav