Friday, June 16, 2023

Find Any File 2.4

Thomas Tempelmann (tweet):

Scripted Rules allow for custom file matching with Lua or JavaScript code.

[…]

Rule File Content now looks inside zip files, including .docx (Word) and .xlsx (Excel) files.

[…]

The popup menu with the search locations includes a Recent Locations menu that lists folders you had previously chosen for a search.

If you hold down the command key when double clicking on items in the results, they’re not opened but revealed in Finder instead.

Searching for files by name in Finder hasn’t worked very well since Mac OS X Tiger, if not earlier. I mostly use EagleFiler for this, but for files that it isn’t managing I recently started using Find Any File instead of the find command, in many cases. It reminds me of Mac OS 8—pre-Sherlock—in a good way.

Find Any File Scripts:

This makes it possible to create very specific and complex search rules.

[…]

Later versions of FAF may add more scripting features, such as for displaying custom columns and more information about listed files and folders, and offering more commands in the contextual menu for found items.

[…]

Basically, you have to implement a function named match that takes one argument, and returns either true or false (returning nothing is fine, too, and is the same as returning false). The one argument is an object providing access to many properties of the to-be-checked item (i.e. either a file or a folder).

I like where this is going. Unfortunately, enabling the JavaScript debugger for testing doesn’t work with notarization, so you need to downoad a separate version of the app if you want to do that.

Update (2023-06-29): Pierre Igot:

Absolutely delighted to find that, in macOS Ventura, doing a file search in a specific folder in the Finder is working as well as ever.

I mean, who ever searches for files in a specific folder using key words that appear in their file names? In 2023?

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I've never found Spotlight useful. I've been using EasyFind myself (https://www.devontechnologies.com/apps/freeware), but FAF certainly looks worth checking out as well.

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