MacOS – How to search folder names from Open/Save Dialog in El Capitan

findermacossearchspotlight

When I switched from Windows to OS X Mavericks, it took me a few months to learn that the fastest way to open or save documents in an application was to search for the folder they should be in.

Under El Capitan, it seems to be increasingly difficult to find an application that allows me to find a folder name in the Open/Save dialog boxes. Almost every application only allows me to find the names of files, and systematically excludes folders. (One exception is Save As in Office 2016, which allows me to search folder names.) How can I fix this? Am I crazy for thinking this used to work?

P.S. The folders I'm looking for show up find in normal Spotlight searches.

Best Answer

You can type kind:folder in search bar of your Open/Save Dialog to search only for folders. Alternatively, you can click on + next to Save if you are doing a Save As on the right side to select kind as folders from the dropdown.

PS: The search bar containing This Mac Active etc. only appears after you have typed something in the top search bar.

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Try "searchterm NOT kind:message"

MacOS – How to create a Saved Search that excludes a specific folder from the results

I looked at some of the saved search files in Finder's application bundle, and for example /System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app/Contents/Resources/MyLibraries/myDocuments.cannedSearch/search.savedSearch used a format like this for excluding directories:

<key>FXScopeArrayOfPaths</key>
<array>
  <string>~/</string>
  <string>-Library</string>
  <string>-Music/iTunes</string>
  <string>-Documents/Steam Content</string>
  <string>~/Library/Mobile Documents/</string>
  <string>-com~apple~Keynote</string>
  <string>-com~apple~Pages</string>
  <string>-com~apple~Numbers</string>
</array>

So you can exclude subfolders by adding strings that start with a minus character after a full path. Something like -~/Library doesn't seem to work.

You can edit savedSearch files by dropping them on a text editor. RawQueryDict:SearchScopes and FXScope:FXScopeArrayOfPaths seem to list the same paths by default, but just editing the second one appeared to exclude folders at least in Finder.

Best Answer

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MacOS – How to create a Saved Search that excludes a specific folder from the results

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