How to search inside files on a Mac

1. Spotlight

Press ⌘ Space and type a few words from the document. Spotlight searches file names and the text inside files it has indexed, including PDFs, Word, Pages and plain text.

• Put an exact phrase in quotes: "net 30 days".
• Add a kind to narrow it down: invoice kind:pdf.
• Scroll down to the documents section, or choose Search in Finder at the bottom to see all matches.

Good for: a quick lookup when your words are distinctive.

2. Finder's Contents search

1. Open a Finder window and press ⌘ F.
2. Type your words, then choose Contents (not Name) in the menu that appears under the search field.
3. Choose where to search: This Mac or the current folder.
4. Click + to add criteria such as Kind, Last modified date or Created date.

You can save the search with Save — it appears in the Finder sidebar as a Smart Folder that updates by itself.

Good for: narrowing down by folder, kind and date, and keeping a search you run often.

3. Terminal: mdfind

mdfind queries the same index as Spotlight, which is handy for long result lists or scripts.

mdfind "late payment"
mdfind -onlyin ~/Documents "invoice"
mdfind -name "contract"
mdfind 'kMDItemTextContent == "*overdue*"cd'

The last form searches only the text content, ignoring case (c) and accents (d).

4. Terminal: grep for plain-text files

For code, Markdown, logs and other plain-text files, grep reads the files directly and doesn't depend on any index:

grep -ril "late payment" ~/Documents

-r searches folders recursively, -i ignores case and -l lists matching file names. It can't read inside PDFs or Office documents, and it's slow on large folders.

When files don't show up

• Check Spotlight's exclusions. Folders in System Settings › Spotlight › Search Privacy are never indexed.
• Check indexing status. mdutil -s / shows whether indexing is on for your startup disk.
• Rebuild the index. sudo mdutil -E / erases and rebuilds Spotlight's index for the startup disk; it can take a while.
• Cloud-only files. Files in iCloud Drive or other cloud folders that are only in the cloud have no local content to search. Download them first.
• Scanned PDFs. A PDF that's just an image of text has no text to find unless it's been through OCR.

What the built-in tools can't do

Spotlight, Finder and mdfind match the words you type. They don't help when:

• You remember the meaning, not the wording — you search "refund policy" and the document says "returns and reimbursements".
• You need to see why a file matched — results are file names, so you open each one to find the passage.
• The document is long — you find the right 60-page PDF, then search inside it again.

When a dedicated app helps

Several Mac apps add to what's built in — see our roundup of Spotlight alternatives. Memtrove is the one we make:

• Search by meaning as well as by name and content, so "contract about late payment fees" finds it even when those words aren't in it.
• Every result says why it matched — in content, in file name or by meaning — and the preview opens the matching section of the document.
• Plain-word filters like last month in Downloads "net 30 days".
• Your own index, on your Mac, independent of Spotlight's settings.
• Optional AI apps: let Claude search and read your files.