how to find anything on your mac

 
With the release of FT2 2.13 comes a new SuperSearch function. You can use this to find anything on your mac or connected drives, open folders (including hidden ones) and launch apps. You can open SuperSearch quickly by holding down the shift key when you click the F2 icon in the status bar.

If you’re familiar with EasyFind and Spotlight, you can think of SuperSearch as sort of a ‘Spotlight on Steroids’ (use the ‘Faster’ option’) combined with an ‘EasyFind without the overhead’ (use the ‘Deeper’ option). SuperSearch supports using the spacebar to open Quick Look and double-clicking to reveal an item in the Finder.

For the most part, you’ll want to use the options ‘Faster’, ‘String’ and alternate between ‘Name’ (for files) or ‘Content’ (for text within files). Choose to include case sensitivity, emails and web history as needed. However, there’s a lot of different ways you can use SuperSearch. Here’s a few examples:

Find hidden files
(use ‘Deeper’, ‘Name’, ‘String’)
 

Find files by bundle identifier
(use ‘Deeper’, ‘Name’, ‘String’)
 

Open folders in the Finder
(just type the path and hit return; use ~/ to target the home folder; the options are not relevant)
 

 
Search for text in files
(use ‘Faster’, ‘Content’, ‘String’ for speed, or use ‘Deeper’ if you want to target a particular drive or directory, or if you want to search for content within hidden files and packages, too).

When you use ‘Deeper’ to search for content, the item name includes a hit count of the number of occurrences of the search term in that file:
 

Launch applications
(prefix the app name with ` (that’s the key directly above the ‘tab’ key) to tell SuperSearch you want to open it rather than find it. The options are not relevant).
 

🙂
 

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