Finding files

When you need to track down files anywhere on your Mac — by name, by what they contain, or by size and date — use the Find Files window. It searches one or more folders (and their subfolders), can look inside text files and archives, and lets you send everything it finds straight into a panel so you can act on the results as if they were an ordinary folder.

Find files by name

1. In the panel showing the folder you want to search, choose Commands > Find Files… (or press Cmd+Shift+F).
2. On the General tab, type a name pattern in Search for. You can use wildcards such as *.pdf or report_*.docx. To search several folders at once, list them in the start-folder field separated by a semicolon (;).
3. Click Start. Matches appear in the results list below as they are found.
4. Double-click any result to jump to that file in the active panel, or select a result and click View (F3) to open it in the built-in viewer.

(Figure: The General tab — search by name pattern across one or more folders.)

Search by content, size, and date

1. To search inside files, select Find text on the General tab and type the text to look for. Options let you make it Case sensitive, match only a Whole word, treat the text as a Regular expression, do a Hex content search, or find files that are Not containing the text.
2. Switch to the Advanced tab to narrow results by Size (for example 10K to 5M), by modified date range, or to files changed in the last N days.
3. Turn on Search inside archives to look within zip-family archives (zip, jar, war, and similar).
4. To limit the search to what you already picked, turn on Search in selected items only before starting.
5. Turn on Also search file comments and the text is looked for in each file's comment as well as in its contents. That is how you find a file again by what you wrote about it — "the customer's original", "superseded by the 2026 export" — when nothing of the sort appears inside the file. A result found that way shows the comment instead of a line of the file, and no line number, because the match is not in the file's text. Case sensitivity, whole word and regular expressions apply to a comment exactly as they do to contents; a hex search does not, since a comment is text somebody typed. Not containing stays consistent: a file is listed when the text is in neither its contents nor its comment. If the Notes plugin is switched on, its note is available as a content field, which you can filter on under Plugins — see Working with plugins.
6. Some plugins can turn a file into text that the file itself does not contain — the decompiler plugin turns a .class into Java source. Turn on Search text provided by plugins and those files are searched as that text instead of as their own bytes, so a phrase from the source is found in a compiled class. The option only appears when such a plugin is installed, and it is slower: producing the text can mean running a decompiler once per file.

(Figure: The Advanced tab — filter by size, date, and other attributes.)

If you have plugins that add content fields (such as image dimensions), the Plugins tab lets you require a field to match a condition — for example, only images wider than 1000 pixels.

(Figure: The Plugins tab — match on plugin-provided content fields.)

Fast searches with Spotlight

For local folders that macOS has already indexed, turn on Use Spotlight on the General tab for near-instant results. Spotlight searches the index instead of scanning files, so it ignores regular expressions, subfolder depth limits, and the selection-only scope.

Reuse and hand off your results

• Feed to Listbox places every result into the active panel as a temporary list, so you can copy, move, or delete the whole set at once.
• On the Load / Save tab, choose Save as Template… to store the current search (patterns and options) and pick it again later from the template list.

Shortcuts

Action	Shortcut
Open Find Files	Cmd+Shift+F or Option+F7
Start / stop the search	Start button in the window
View the selected result	F3

Notes

• Content search reads whole files for local folders; on other locations very large files are skipped (roughly 16 MB, or 64 MB when using a regular expression).
• Searching inside archives descends up to four levels of nested archives.
• Include folders in results also lists folders whose names match, not just files.
• Spotlight covers indexed local folders only; for network locations or pattern-based matching, leave it off and let Find Files scan.