App: Find Any File (FAF)
Developer: Thomas Tempelmann
Genres: Utilities, Productivity

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 nor Mails – 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.

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 ••

  FAF can not search file content other than plain (unformatted and RTF) and zip-compressed text (as used by Word for instance) - and even that is comparatively slow, so don't expect this to be a good replacement for Spotlight when you need to find text in your documents.

  For searching text in Mails, PDF and similar files, FAF won't be of use. Instead, Spotlight is still the best tool for those file (whose results can be enhanced with Tembo and HoudahSpot, also available in the App Store).

•• 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.”

Release notes:
v2.4.1:
• Fixes a crash when searching certain (network or encrypted) volumes

v2.4 (released June 1, 2023):
• The rule "Name ends with" now excludes the extension, so that “Name ends with pies” finds a file named “Recipies.txt”.
• The “Path” rule now matches on the entire path, not just on the item's enclosing path any more.
• The rule “Kind is not Video” does now correctly exclude video files.
• The search rules have been re-arranged and modernized.
• Fixes issues with searching Google Drive.
• When choosing the iCloud folder as a search location, FAF will search all iCloud related application folders, not just the "iCloud Drive" folder.
• Searching a folder (instead of entire volume) now properly skips excluded folders again.
• When performing another search while looking at the results of a previous search, the new Results window won't pop up in front any more.
• Improvements to displaying results in Dark Mode.
• The menu bar now offers a "Join Beta Program" command, for getting access to pre-releases of FAF in the future, via Apple's TestFlight program.
• The purchase date in the About window is now shown correctly.
• Issues with the Toolbar in the Results window have been fixed. Now you can choose to show the smaller icons or the wider text labels. To do that, ctrl-click into the toolbar to customize it, and drag the desired toolbar items in or out.
• Determining the Finder selection doesn't stall FAF any more (this used to happen whenever FAF was activated).