Mac OS X: The Missing Manual, Panther Edition

Finding Files 2: The Find Window

The Search bar is simple, fast, and above all, convenient. It’s always there, happy to serve you, no matter what Finder window you’re in.

It’s not, however, the most powerful search program on earth. It searches only for icons’ names, not their sizes, dates, and so on. And it can’t look for words inside your files.

There is a feature that can perform these more complex searches, though; in fact, no modern self-respecting operating system would be without it. But here’s a bit of news that may shock veteran Mac and Windows users: In Mac OS X 10.3, you don’t search your own machine using the same program you use to search the Web. (Heresy! Scandal! Sacrilege!)

Actually, it’s a move to be applauded. Over the years, be-all, end-all search programs like Apple’s Sherlock and Microsoft’s Search Assistant had become slow, sluggish, ungainly creatures that didn’t do either job especially well. In Mac OS X 10.3 (as in 10.2), you use one program just for finding files on your Mac, and a different one (Sherlock) to search the Internet. (More on Sherlock in Chapter 20.)

To meet the new file-finding tool, choose File→Find (or press -F). The shockingly simple dialog box shown in Figure 2-13 appears next.

As you’ll soon discover, the Find window can hunt down icons using extremely specific criteria. If you spent enough time setting up the search, you could use this program ...