Find what Spotlight can't

File Ferret includes a 3-day free trial with every feature unlocked. After the trial, it's a one-time purchase of $4.99 — no subscription, no recurring charges.

Plain text in any common encoding (.txt, .csv, .log, .json, .xml, source code — UTF-8, UTF-16, Latin-1 auto-detected). PDFs (both embedded text and scanned/image-only pages via built-in OCR). Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint — including headers, footers, footnotes, endnotes, comments, and speaker notes. OpenDocument writer, calc, and impress (.odt, .ods, .odp). Apple iWork — Pages, Numbers, and Keynote. Images via OCR (PNG, JPG, TIFF, HEIC, HEIF, BMP, GIF, WebP). And inside ZIP archives — text, PDFs, and images all extracted and searched.

No. File Ferret works entirely offline. It searches your local filesystem directly — no cloud services, no indexing servers, no account needed.

Yes. Any volume or folder mounted on your Mac is searchable — including SMB shares, external drives, and cloud-synced folders from OneDrive, Dropbox, or iCloud Drive.

File Ferret requires macOS Tahoe 26 or later and runs on Apple Silicon Macs.

Popular Windows file search tools like Agent Ransack® are Windows-only. File Ferret brings the same class of functionality to macOS natively — separate file name and content search fields, full regex and wildcard support, Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT), advanced filters, and highlighted match previews. File Ferret is not affiliated with Mythicsoft or Agent Ransack.

Yes. File Ferret was built for power users who switched from Windows to Mac and needed the same caliber of file search. It offers separate filename and content search fields, full regex and wildcard support, Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT), advanced filters by date, size, and type, and highlighted match previews — all native to macOS.

No. File Ferret searches your filesystem directly — no indexing setup, no waiting for an index to build. Open the app, choose a folder, and start searching immediately.

Yes — case-sensitive and whole-word toggles, on both filename and content search.

Yes. Content search supports a NEAR proximity operator alongside AND, OR, NOT, quoted phrases, and parentheses. Write "invoice" NEAR "overdue" to match when both appear close together (default within 10 words), or NEAR/5 to set the distance. You can also drop an inline regex into a Boolean query with REGEX:\d{4,}.

Yes. File Ferret reads the visible text from every iWork document — Pages, Numbers, and Keynote — including documents saved as packages or flat files. Find that contract clause buried in a Pages doc you saved last summer, or the figure on slide 14 of a Keynote from two clients ago.

Yes. File Ferret opens .zip files on the fly and searches every entry — text, PDFs, OCR'd images. Matched archive entries are flagged with an archivebox badge and previewable inline.

No, unless you want it to. Turn on "Skip cloud-only files" and File Ferret only searches what's already downloaded — no surprise iCloud, OneDrive, or Dropbox pulls.

Yes. Save any query — pattern, filters, scope — by name and recall it later. File Ferret also keeps per-field history (file name, content, search path) and a recent-directories list.

Yes. Narrow any search to files carrying the Finder tags you choose — match any or all of a set, and exclude tags too. For example, find everything tagged "Invoice" but not "Paid." File Ferret discovers the tags already in use on your Mac automatically.

CSV, JSON, HTML, TSV, and plain text. Useful for audits, evidence gathering, or sharing what you found. You can also drag matched files straight out of the result list into Finder, Mail, or any other app.