Find anything, fast.
Three layers of search: the quick filter to narrow the current view, Quick Search to scan a folder by name, and Full Search to hunt across a whole tree — names, contents, even inside archives. All keyboard-driven.
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.
Quick Search
Cmd+F opens Quick Search. As you type, it filters the current folder by name and jumps to the matches — fast, in-memory, with no walking of subfolders.
- Search subfolders — tick this to turn Quick Search into a recursive name search of the whole tree beneath the current folder.
- Case sensitive — off by default; tick to match capitalisation exactly.
Need to search file contents, or look inside archives? Reach for Full Search (Shift+Cmd+F) instead.
Full Search
Shift+Cmd+F opens Full Search — the powerful, recursive one, rooted at the active pane’s directory. It opens in its own Search Files window, and results stream in as the walk progresses.
Move through results with the arrow keys, press Enter to jump to a hit in the pane (the search window closes), or press Cmd+Enter to send every result to the inactive pane as a virtual folder — perfect for batch operations on the matches.
Choose how it looks with the mode selector:
- Spotlight — leans on the macOS index for near-instant results.
- Deep — the default. Walks the tree directly, so it finds everything, indexed or not.
- Hybrid — starts from the index, then fills the gaps with a direct walk. A file both find is listed once.
The remaining controls narrow what counts as a match:
- Search file contents — look inside files, not just at their names. Besides text files, this reads PDFs and Office documents: Word, Excel and PowerPoint (
.docx,.xlsx,.pptx) and their OpenDocument equivalents (.odt,.ods,.odp), on your Mac and on servers. The older.doc,.xlsand.pptformats aren’t read. - Case sensitive and Regex — match capitalisation exactly, or treat the query as a full regular expression.
- Search in archives and Search archive contents — reach into ZIPs and other archives, by name and by content.
- File types — a comma-separated list of extensions (for example
swift,txt,md) to limit the hunt to just those kinds. This is the one and only attribute filter — there are no size, date, owner, or kind predicates. - Save… — keep a search for later; it lands in the sidebar under Saved Searches.
On the direct-download build, Full Search hands the heavy lifting to fd and ripgrep when they’re installed, for a big speed-up. The sandboxed Mac App Store build can’t run external binaries, so it uses the built-in walker instead — same results, a little slower on very large trees.
Ignore files are respected either way. Inside a git repository, Full Search skips whatever .gitignore skips — and anything listed in a .cdignore file at the folder you’re searching from (same syntax as .gitignore). The built-in search follows the same rules as fd and ripgrep, so your results don’t change depending on whether those tools are installed.
Patterns & content
Full Search matches names in two ways. Two checkboxes have keyboard shortcuts so you don’t need to mouse over:
- Cmd+E — toggle Regex. Off (the default) = plain substring match; on = regular expression.
- Cmd+/ — toggle Case sensitive.
| Plain | Substring match |
| Regex | Standard regular expressions — ^\d{4}-.*\.md$ |
Tick Search file contents to grep inside files as well. Captain’s Deck respects .gitignore, .cdignore, and binary-file detection:
- The Match column shows the line that matched, so you can see the context at a glance
- Enter on a result jumps to that file in the pane
Saved searches
Run a search you’ll want again? Click Save… in Full Search, give it a name, done. The saved search appears in the sidebar under a Saved Searches section.
Click a saved search to re-run it against the active pane’s current path — Full Search 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.