MacOS – Sublime Text like fuzzy filesystem search for Mac OS X

alfredfindermacmacossearch

Currently I am using Alfred's filesystem navigation capabilities. It's pretty awesome, but sometimes I want fuzzy-search to match not only the filename but the full path.

E.g. I want to find a pdf file with some very common filename (say proposal.pdf). And I have a directory structure like this:

 - dropbox
   - partners
     - supercorp
       - proposal.pdf
     - megacorp
       - proposal.pdf

It would be nice if I can type dro/meg/propos to get to the megacorp's proposal file. The answer may be the Alfred plugin or some configuration, but I'll accept any solution that allows me to quickly navigate to this file and perform some action (e.g. reveal in Finder or something). "Search-as-you-type" functionality is very important.

UPD Just found a similar question. Seems that full path matching feature is missing because mdfind is only searching the file name and all the tools are using it internally.

Best Answer

You may try Findspot. Findspot supports these features

Fuzzy search like Sublime Text's Control-P
Full path search
Search as you type

Here is a screenshot of Findspot when using your example:

Actually, you can skip the slashes and you will still get the same result.

Related Solutions

Combining Finder’s File Open/save dialog with Alfred

Once you find the file using Alfred, you can copy its path to the clipboard and paste that path into the Go to Folder tool of open/save dialogs.

Find your file in Alfred, press the right arrow key to view the list of operations for that file, the up arrow key to go to the last option (Copy path to clipboard), and then the enter key to activate that option.
Switch back to the open/save dialog, press cmd-shift-g to open the Go to Folder dialog, paste the path in, and hit enter. The file will be selected and you can hit Enter to open/save.

If you're interested in getting some more flexibility out of Open/Save dialogs, I highly recommend Default Folder X. It's immensely powerful and customizable and could eliminate the need for workarounds like this.
$35, 30 day trial

MacOS – launch the File (Save/Open) Dialog from the command line

This can be done using AppleScript, like in the question you linked to. Watch out, this is not the same as Automator.

Example script:

osascript -e 'tell application (path to frontmost application as text)
set myFile to choose file
POSIX path of myFile
end'

This uses the simplest form of the choose file command, and puts the result in the variable myFile. The result will be of type alias, which has a POSIX path property, which we read in the next line. The result will be written to stdout.

Look here for all the possible optional options to the choose file command. You can e.g. provide a custom prompt text, choose a default location, or only allow certain file types.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Combining Finder’s File Open/save dialog with Alfred

MacOS – launch the File (Save/Open) Dialog from the command line

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