About Find Any File, version 1.6

Written by and Copyright © 2005-2011 Thomas Tempelmann
http://apps.tempel.org/FindAnyFile/

This is a program for Mac OS X that lets you search for files on your disks, primarily on HFS formatted ones. (It requires OS X 10.4.1 or later.)

Contrary to Spotlight, it does not use a database but instead uses the file system driver's fast search operations, where available. This lets you search for file properties such as name, dates, size, etc., but not for file content (use Spotlight or EasyFind for that).

Find Any File can find files that Spotlight doesn't, e.g. those inside bundles and packages and in inside folders that are usually excluded from Spotlight search.

Finally, it is quite fast. A search only takes a few seconds.

Features

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

  1. It sports a new hierarchical view for the found items. You can switch to it using Command-2 or click on the right little icon at the top of the results window:

    2. Hierarchical results example

    Note that the search above revealed hundreds of hits. If you'd look at that many results in a flat list, it would be hard to browse. With this new hierarchical view, however, you can directly look for the results in the folders that interest you.

  2. If you hold the Option key (alt) 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 volumes (something that Spotlight won't do). Note that this will only work on local disks, not on network mounts, though.
  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.

Search Examples

Find recent changes

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).

Find inside music folder

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.

Find docs of 09

Or you might want to find all Numbers documents created in 2009 only.

Limitations

This tool's design was inspired by the Classic Mac OS' Find File application, hence its UI design might look a little old fashioned. That's because I rather I push around code, not pixels.

The user interface of this app gets somewhat sluggish when it's performing a search. This is mostly out of my control, as this app is written with REAL Studio, which has a rather unsatisfying multi-threading implementation. To fix this, I'd have to invest a lot of work, which I'd rather commit to other projects that are also in need of my attention. My apologies.

Tips & Tricks

Besides the obvious things you can see by looking at the menus, there are a few things that are not so obvious:

Searching inside a folder

To search only inside a particular folder, you can drag the folder's icon right on top of the topmost popup menu in the Find window.

Copying the path name of a found item

To copy a path name of a found item to the clipboard, right-click on the path field at the very bottom, where you can then choose from 3 different formats:

Path access in results

Shell style is good for pasting into a Terminal window,
POSIX style is the original unix-style path and
Mac style gives the classic Mac path using ":" as delimiters.

Setting the preferred disk to search

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.

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

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.

Resetting your preferences at launch

If you hold down the Option (alt) key at launch if Find Any File, the previously saved defaults won't be loaded, but instead a standard Find window will appear. Use this to circumvent problems such as to prevent opening a server volume you might have saved as default.

If you hold down both Shift and Option keys when launching Find Any File, you will be prompted to reset all preferences. Use this if windows won't appear any more, or other things you customized are causing trouble.

Launching Find Any File by a keyboard shortcut, just like Spotlight

This can now (since version 1.6) be enabled directly in the Preferences window of Find Any File.

For instance, to open FAF when pressing Command-F in the Finder, set the Hot Key up as follows:

Alternatives to Find Any File

If you like to search for data inside files, and Spotlight doesn't do it for you, have a look at EasyFind by DEVONtechnologies. It offers a few extra search options (e.g. wildcards), displays results a bit neater and has a single-window user interface which you might prefer. Since version 4.6 (released in Nov 2010) it also uses the fast disk search function that Find Any File uses (CatalogSearch), where appropriate. More info here: http://www.devon-technologies.com/products/freeware/

And if you want to search for specific text in a large set of files inside a directory, try TextWrangler (http://www.barebones.com/products/textwrangler/).

Version History

Acknowledgements

Icon design by Chris Paveglio (www.paveglio.com)

I also thank Michael Berglund, Edward Loveall and especially Alexey Volokhov for their contributions of alternative icons.

I am grateful to Kuniaki Maruyama from Japan for making me aware of a REALbasic font display problem on japanese OS X systems, and for helping me fix it.

French translation by Ronald A. Leroux, proofreading by Renaud Boisjoly and Stéphane Pinel.

Italian translation by Vincenzo Boiano (VinBoiSoft).

Finally, many thanks to all the testers for the 1.5 release. Out of ~150 who contacted me directly in the past, thanking for FAF or making inquiries, 42 of those responded when I asked them for help with testing, and all of them were helpful, many of them pointing out problems I overlooked, making good suggestions or helping me with decisions. It was an uplifting experience.

Questions, Feedback, Contact

To contact me, write to tempelmann@gmail.com
The app's website is: http://apps.tempel.org/FindAnyFile/

And now, I hope you enjoy using Find Any File.