How to make Finder search within the contents of files

finder

In Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard through at least Mac OS X 10.11 El Captain, when you typed in the search box in Finder, a silver bar would appear below it. Starting from the left side of this bar, there is the text Search: and next to it there are two buttons that say This Mac and the name of the current folder in double quotes. In Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, and possible Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, there were two more buttons all the way over to the right that said Names (or maybe it was Filenames) and Contents. If Contents was selected, then Finder would look inside files for the text that is typed into the search bar.

I'm on Mac OS X 10.11 El Capitan right now and there is no such choice of buttons (i.e., between Names and Contents). This has bugged me for several years, but now I'm done ignoring it. How can I make Finder search in files' contents? I presume that on the older version of Mac OS X, when Finder searched file contents, it didn't change the Last opened date of each file, too (which is how I want it). I don't want to use grep or another application. I want to make Finder behave like this. I will only accept an alternative browser application if it is sufficiently like Finder in terms of features and design.

Best Answer

I'll put some pictures to the reply answers given.

  1. Add something to the search field to get the search options to show up. I just used a space in this example.
  2. Click the + button to the right of save. Get search options to show.
  3. Choose contents from the left drop down menu and then type in your search term. You may need to clear out whatever you added in the main search field to not limit your results. enter image description here
  4. You can instead type content:search term in the main search field. enter image description here
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