Finder Searchbar

improving finder / spotlight search

What problem does this solve?

Finder search kinda sucks. [ftnote – actually it has gotten somewhat better with the latest update]. I always have a bunch of irrelevant modules / sysfiles / logs showing up, and it's hard to find what I'm looking for.

Time spent?

3 hrs

Description

This is a raycast extension for minimal file search. It's quite opinionated, but it works for me. Features:

Keyboard shortcut to launch
'Enter' reveals the file in finder, 'Cmd + Enter' opens it directly

Design decisions

I built on top of Raycast, because I didn't want to design the UI myself. I like fiewing files in finder, just not searching for them there!

Many niceties – preview, view metadata, etc
=> Enter defaults to view in finder

Better search

Search is limited to Documents & Downloads (which is where 95% of my relevant files are)
Claude generated a bunch of file-pattern exclusions, to get rid of logs / build files / internal scrapes / etc
Simple sorting by subword match

[22nd Feb] Do I use this?

Yeah! The latest version of Finder has improved and is more expressive. But for quick, simple file search, I generally default to this.