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Searching the OS Index

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Your operating system already keeps an index of your files, their names, their contents, and much more about them: Spotlight on macOS, Windows Search on Windows. XeFM can search that index and show what it finds as a list you can sort, filter, copy, move and delete in.

Action Menu
index_search View → Search Spotlight… (macOS) / Search Windows Search… (Windows)

Keys depend on your keymap preset — see Keymap Presets.

It opens the search dialog in its index mode, next to Search Files and Search Content: Tab steps between the three. Results appear as you type, and Enter opens them all in the pane as a list, the cursor on the row you were on.

It searches the active pane’s folder and everything below it. To search your whole home folder, run it from there.

This is for macOS and Windows. On Linux, use Open List from Command with your indexer’s own tool (plocate, baloosearch, recollq).

Without any syntax: the filter chips

The chips at the right of the status row narrow any search: Kind (folders, documents, images, videos, audio, archives), Date (modified today, in the past 7 or 30 days, this year) and Size (1 MB, 100 MB or 1 GB and more). Click one to pick a value. They combine with whatever you type, and with nothing typed they search on their own: Kind Images and Date Past 7 days finds every picture under this folder changed this week. See Search Options.

Writing a query

The query is written the way that OS’s own search reads it.

On macOS (Spotlight), as in Spotlight’s search field:

Query Finds
budget 2026 files whose name or contents have both words
name:report files with “report” in their name
kind:pdf PDF documents (also kind:image, kind:movie, kind:folder, …)
kMDItemPixelWidth > 4000 images wider than 4000 pixels
kMDItemDurationSeconds > 600 audio and video longer than ten minutes
kMDItemWhereFroms == "*example.com*" files downloaded from a site
kMDItemLastUsedDate > $time.today(-7) files you opened in the last week

On Windows (Windows Search):

Query Finds
budget 2026 files whose name or contents contain both words
where System.Size > 100000000 a raw Windows Search SQL condition — here, files over 100 MB
where System.Kind = 'picture' pictures

Queries you have run before hang from the query field: click ▾ at its right end, or press Alt-↓, and pick one. Shift-Delete forgets the highlighted one.

The results

The matches open in the active pane as a list, titled with the query. Every list feature works there: sort by date or size, filter, select, copy, move, view, and sync_other_to_current to reveal a file where it really lives. Backspace returns to the folder.

If the index cannot be asked, the reason shows in the dialog’s status line.

Finder saved searches

A Finder Smart Folder is a .savedSearch file, usually in ~/Library/Saved Searches. Press Enter on one in XeFM and it runs its query in the folders it was saved with, showing the matches as a list named after it. Searches you built in Finder become one-key lists here.

Things to know