Utilities
Find Any File (FAF)
Thomas Tempelmann
About
Frustrated with Spotlight because it doesn't find files you know exist? Use FAF to find all the files on your drives, including those that are usually hidden. By file name, date, size and even text content.
You can even search drives that are not indexed by Spotlight, including server volumes. Find Any File can find files that aren't in Spotlight, such as those inside packages, as well as in system folders that are typically excluded from Spotlight searches.
Unlike Spotlight, it does not use a database, but searches the disk directly for data. It allows you to search file properties such as name, creation and modification dates, file size, even plain text inside files.
Another useful feature is the hierarchical viewing of results. It allows you to view found items in their respective folders, making it much easier to browse through hundreds of found items.
•• Note ••
FAF can't search file contents other than plain (unformatted) text - and even that is quite slow, so don't expect it to be a good replacement for Spotlight.
For searching text in email documents, Word, PDFs, and similar files, Spotlight is still the best tool (the results of which can be improved with Tembo, also available in the App Store).