Hi there, I am new to macOS. From my limited knowledge, there is a function called Spotlight Search that can show you any file or program you want to open when you type in related info like its name, format, modified time, and so on. But I have some questions here, can I find the hidden files on Mac with Spotlight Search? If not, how can I find any hidden files on my Mac? Moreover, I want to know if there is an all-in-one feature that can find any file on Mac. Sorry for so many questions, since I have been using Windows for the past decades, I just got my new Mac weeks ago so I want to know more things about Mac. Any info and answer will be appreciated! Thanks!
Spotlight is a search utility on Mac. It uses the Mac mds_stores, corespotlightd, and other daemons to index all the content on your Mac hard drive, allowing you to directly access your desired documents, folders, photos, apps, etc. by searching for the specific words contained in the target item.
With Spotlight Search, you can access any information on your Mac quickly and easily. It greatly shortens your time for getting what you want from the Mac scuttered with files and programs.
You can follow the steps below to find the files you want to access:
Step 1: Click the Spotlight icon at the upper right corner of your Mac screen to open the Spotlight Search bar. Alternatively, you can press the Mac Spotlight shortcut - Command + Space.
Step 2: Enter your search query into the search box. The search results show up as you type.
Step 3: Click the search results for a preview.
Step 4: Double-click your target item from the search results to directly open it.
While the hidden files, are grayed out so that you know they’re “hidden”, you can access them as you would any normal file or folder. It isn’t a perfect solution, though. If you’re looking for a particular file, you’ll need to know where on your system it’s stored, as hidden files don’t show up in a Spotlight search. Therefore, you can only press the Command - Shift - dot ( ⌘+⇧ +. ) together in a certain folder to open the hidden files as you wish.
A hidden file or folder is a file/folder which filesystem utilities do not display by default when showing a directory listing. Mac OS has always hidden some vital files on the startup disk. Spotlight Search cannot show the hidden files on Mac. For access to the hidden files on your Mac, you need to lick the Finder icon at the Mac Dock to open it, then in the left sidebar, click the Macintosh HD folder under Locations, and finally, press Command + Shift + Period (.) key combinations to show the hidden files on your Mac.
If you’d like to unhide the hidden files on Mac with Terminal, that is, run some command lines on your machine, you can try these steps:
- Open Terminal from Launchpad > Other.
- Type in the following command in the Terminal window and press the Return key:
defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE
- Then type in this one and hit the Return key to refresh the Finder and the desktop.
killall Finder
If you do not like the ways mentioned above, you can trust a third-party software called Find Any File.
Find Any File is a program for Apple’s macOS computers that lets you search for files on your disks. FAF can find files that Spotlight doesn’t, e.g. on network (NAS) and other external volumes, hidden ones inside bundles and packages, and those in folders that are usually excluded from Spotlight search, such as the System and Library folders. It can even search in other users’ folders if you use FAF’s unique root search mode. FAF lets you search precisely for many file properties such as name, extension, date range, size, kind, etc.
Find Any File isn’t meant to replace Spotlight, but it complements it greatly.
If you search for files by name, size, dates, kind, and other directory properties, use FAF, because only then you can be sure that everything available is found, even if Spotlight hasn’t indexed it.
FAF can also find textual content in plain text, in zip (including Word and Excel files), and even in most binary files. With the option to include Spotlight results, it can also find text in PDF documents as long as they were indexed by Spotlight.
FAF isn’t the best tool for extended attributes and metadata stored in files, such as image sizes, EXIF data, and GPS coordinates (check out the alternatives below for that), but even some of that can be resolved by using external scripts.
FAF gets loads of features and highlights here:
Better results: It offers an alternative hierarchical view of the found items.
Image Preview: If you’re looking for pictures, the image preview browser is helpful as well.
Find everything on your disk: If you hold the Option key (alt ⌥) down in the Find window, the Find button turns into Find All. If you click on it then, you are asked for an administrator password - and then Find Any File will restart in root mode, being able to find any file on your Mac’s volumes, including files in other users’ home directories (something that Spotlight won’t do). Note that this will only work on local disks, not on network mounts, though.
You can save your entered searches to files (they’ll have the extension “.faf”). You can then double-click them in the Finder to have them start the search immediately, or use the saved search as a preset.
The found results can be copied to the clipboard or saved to a text file that contains the paths (extension “.paths”), for further processing. You can also open such .paths files again in FAF.
Integrate with Alfred, Keyboard Maestro, and PopClip. See here for details.
Hide and unhide individual files and folders (ctrl-click on the found items for a menu).
Delete user-installed locked files that the Finder won’t let you trash. (Note that some can’t be deleted at first attempt and may require you to reboot the Mac first before trying again, while other files, especially those owned or managed by macOS, can never be deleted due to Apple’s security model).
There also are some other alternatives to Find Any File like EasyFind, Scherlokk, ProFind, HoudahSpot, Tembo, and so on. If you’d like to figure out what files or folders are eating up your Mac space, iBoysoft MagicMenu is a nice choice, which displays every single file and folder on your machine in a visual table.