Find anything, fast.
Two layers of search: the quick filter for “narrow this view” and the find dialog for “hunt across a tree”. Both are keyboard-driven and respect your gitignore.
The quick filter
Press / in any pane to start typing a filter. Captain’s Deck hides every file whose name doesn’t match — instantly, as you type.
- Case-insensitive by default
- Substring match anywhere in the name
- Esc clears the filter
The filter is view-only. Selection, copy, and other operations only see filtered files — perfect for “copy all the .png files” without manually selecting.
The find dialog
Cmd+F opens the find dialog — a recursive search rooted at the active pane’s directory. Results appear in a third panel that slides up from the bottom.
You can navigate results with j/k, press Enter to jump to a hit in the pane, or press Cmd+Enter to send all results to the inactive pane as a virtual folder — perfect for batch operations on the matches.
Regex & glob
The find dialog has two checkboxes you’ll reach for often. Each has a keyboard shortcut so you don’t need to mouse over to it:
- Cmd+E — toggle Regex. Off = substring or glob; on = full regex.
- Cmd+/ — toggle Case sensitive.
Pattern syntax:
| Plain | Substring match |
| Glob | *.swift, **/test_*.py |
| Regex | Full PCRE2 — ^\d{4}-.*\.md$ |
Content search (grep)
Toggle the “Search file contents” checkbox or press Cmd+Shift+F. Captain’s Deck spawns a fast ripgrep-style worker that respects .gitignore, .cdignore, and binary-file detection.
- Per-line previews with the matching span highlighted
- Enter on a result opens the file scrolled to the match
- Cmd+D opens the diff view against the inactive pane’s same-named file
Attribute filters
Click + Filter in the find dialog to add metadata predicates. Stack as many as you want; they AND together.
- Size (> 10MB, < 1KB, between)
- Modified (today, this week, before 2024-06-01)
- Kind (image, video, source code, archive)
- Owner / group
- Has extended attributes
Saved searches
Run a search you’ll want again? Click Save… in the find dialog, give it a name, done. The saved search appears in the sidebar under a new Saved Searches section.
Click a saved search to re-run it against the active pane’s current path — the dialog reopens pre-filled with the same query, mode, regex/case toggles, and file-type filter you saved. Right-click → Remove Saved Search to delete one.
Saved searches live in your preferences, not per-folder, so they follow you no matter where you’re working.
Quick Open
Cmd+P opens a fuzzy command palette that searches across files, folders, bookmarks, and named commands. It’s the fastest way to jump anywhere when you don’t want to navigate.