• No further changes. Finally, a release again after 1.5 years. Yay!

• A bug regarding text search on Apple Silicon Macs has been fixed.

• I believe I have finally found the frequent crash (inside "KVO") that plagued the betas for the past 6 months. FAF 2.4 is finally ready to be released as soon as Apple approves the App Store version.

• The included manual (see Help menu) has been updated to mention all the new features. This is hopefully the version that gets released as v2.4.
• The "Recent Locations" sub menu can now be disabled by disabling the Enable “Open Recent Search” menu option in the Preferences. There is now also a command to clear the recent entries in the menu.
• The "check for update" options in the Preferences can now be unchecked even in a beta version.
• Dragging a .textClipping into a rule's input field now works.
• The content of so-called "dataless" files is not searched any more by default, because such files are offline, i.e. stored only in the Cloud, and shouldn't get downloaded when FAF searches them. You can change this behavior with the hidden pref "Search skips dataless".

• I am still on the hunt for a crash that occurs quite frequently. As long as that hasn't been found, I don't want to release v2.4. Please use this version and report any crashes, please.

Last minute changes were made - please help testing the changes below.

• Please look up your license at the new license lookup page and follow the instructions.
• Try installing FAF on a fresh system if you have one available and try to register it with both the old and/or the above new method.
• If you send me your e-mail address, I can give you Apple's TestFlight access so that you can also test the App Store version, and see if they mix properly (e.g. install one over the other to see if they keep the license active).
• Note: You can get these instructions (and links) also from FAF's Help / Release Notes menu after you've installed the new version.
• For any feedback, please email me soon!
• Thank you!

FAF will get released this sunday if all goes well! Report any issues immediately, please.

• Completes some missing translations.
• cmd-digit shortcuts work reliably again.

• Fixes misleading error messages when deleting or trashing files.
• This version will soon also be available via Apple's TestFlight. Contact me if you're interested.

• Fixes crash when using Root (Find All) mode (got broken in b11).
• Change: The Kind, Label and Script rules now let you choose "any". With that, you can preset your search with these rules set to do nothing unless you change their value.
• The rules for Trashed, Invisibles and Packages do not enable the Find button on their own any more.
• Searching Google Drive with Spotlight results enabled won't show items outside the Drive any more.
• Updates Croation translation.

• Adds "Font" to "Kind" rule.
• Sorting works again in Tree View.
• Text in Results should be better readable in Dark Mode for (selected) items with labels.
• Hopefully fixes the occasional case where the Stop button remains disabled, with the search never finishing.
• One more attempt at the single remaining crash within "_notifyObserversOfChangeFromValuesForKeys".

• Improvement: Brings ResultsWin to front only if its search window is frontmost.
• Improvement: Additional Find windows automatically appear in Tabs if the Tab Tab is shown, e.g. via the View menu.
• Fixes more recently reported crashes.
• Fixes the "Kind" menu that got messed up in b9.
• Fix: When using "contains" verb, it'll now highlight all and not just first segment of the search term.
• More Japanese translation improvements.

• Fixes some recently reported crashes.
• Changes some keys in the Localizable.strings files so that they all start with "Tr.".
• Note: If you notice any texts that are not getting properly translated, please let me know.
• More Japanese translation improvements.

• New "Recent Locations" submenu that remembers the last folders you searched in.
• Improves Japanese translation.

• Support for Chinese, Japanese, Korean (CJK): A full-width space character can now be used instead of the regular (half-width) space in the Find window to separate text fragments.
• Now includes a Japanese translation, thanks to Mr. Masahito Kawai from MacSTATION Inc. It is still not complete, but if you spot errors, please let me know.

• Fixes occasional crash when starting to search in root mode ("Find All").

• Fixes crash when searching entire volumes (reported by "akira").

• Fixes a freeze-up (beachball).

• New: You can now choose by which type the items should be sorted in Icon/Image Preview mode.
• Fix: Trashing many files should work again.
• Fixes some crashes reported for 2.4b2.

• Change: The option "Show Results Early" won't display a blocking overlay during search any more (option-click on the preference checkbox to get old behavior back).
• Change: The menu title "startup disk" is now "startup volume" because it's technically the correct term. (Do you find that confusing? Please let me know)
• Change: By default, the "(Data)" volumes are not shown any more. Set the pref "Volumes list mode" to 1, 2 or 3 to get them back.
• Change: The "Copy to JSON" menu command doesn't escape slashes any more (requires macOS 10.15 or later).
• Improved: File content search with regex now also finds unicode variants of accented chars and UTF-16 text.
• Fix: Select All (cmd-A) works again in Icon Preview mode.
• Fix: Found items on a network volume don't disappear from the results any more when opening them.
• Fix: No more crash when searching for content with regex (bug got introduced in 2.4b1).
• Fix: Stopping content searches should be quicker now.

• The final version will be 2.4. Please test this b1 throughly and report anything out of the order, including things that were supposed to be fixed in the past year but aren't.
• New support for BBEdit: If you have its Command Line Tools installed, you'll have one or two new commands in the right-click menu:
  • "Find with BBEdit" appears only if you had searched for text content, and then the search is repeated in BBEdit, so that you can see where the seeked text appears in the files.
  • "Browse with BBEdit" opens all items in a single BBEdit window. This feature requires at least v14.1 of BBEdit.
• The "(slow)" indicator for volumes is not shown any more by default. Missing it? Let me know!
• Supports searching Google Drive better when it's in "Mirror Mode".
• If you hold down the command key when double clicking on items in the results, they're not opened but revealed in Finder instead.
• Changed the menu "Show untranslated names" into "Show localized file names" (checked by default).
• When Tabs are enabled in Result windows, new results appear in another Tab instead of a new window.
• When restarting in root mode (Find All) while there are still result windows open, the non-root app remains running along the root app so that the results aren't lost.
• Text content search has been improved for the "regex" input: The text is now considered multi-line, i.e. the regex delimiters ^ and $ can be used.
• Fixes several cases where the results were not updated fully when files were changed or renamed.

• A new command "Rename" lets you rename files and folders in FAF's Result window. Use the menu or type cmd-E.
• The Results menu has a new "Copy Path" sub menu where you can copy the path to the selected items in either POSIX, Terminal, HFS or URL format.
• The Results menu has been re-arranged to better match the order Finder uses.
• Fix: When renaming a file's extension, FAF notices this and updates the "Kind" column accordingly.
• Fixes Quicklook navigation, i.e. when changing the selection.

• Fixes a crash (since b14) that occured when closing windows, quitting or switching the search location.
• New: When saving results, one can now choose to include the rules for later reference.
• Fixes an issue where "Limit Folder Depth" didn't work with Spotlight enabled and some rules such as "Kind is Folder".
• Fix: Shift-Backspace for "Remove from Results" didn't work in Icon view.
• Fix: No more ghost items when deleting found items, then recreating them.
• Fix: Trashing an item in Icon View does not update the PathBar.
• New: The hidden preferemce "HotkeyActivationMode" controls what happens when the Hotkey is used: Value 1 will always bring a Find window to front, even if a Results window was frontmost. Value 2 will always make a "clean" (default) Find window or tab available.

• There is now a rule "Comments" to search for Finder comments (see Info window) aka "Spotlight Comments".
• The rules have been re-arranged.
• When using the Results Filter on Dates, the month and weekday names only match at the beginning of the words now (before, filtering on "ar" would also match on any date in February, now you need to type "f" or "feb" etc. to match those dates).
• New hidden preference "Close All only closes same type of windows" (default: YES)
• Improves the way found files are passed by the "Pass to App" rule, making it faster and more reliable.
• Fixes a bug regarding the calculation of folder sizes.
• Fixes a random crash when using the "Script" rule.
• New hidden preference "Allow any Hotkey" so that Hot Keys can be set to anything, without FAF preventing mistakes.

• The rule "Kind is Text" now includes PDF files, as documented in the manual.
• Changes the rule title "contains literally" to "contains phrase" in hopes of better understanding.
• Improves highlighting of matched file names in Results by showing all matches, not just the first.
• When using the Filter in the Results window, diacritical marks are now ignored in the search unless the filter text uses them explicitly. For instance, a filter "a" finds both names with "a" and "à" in them, whereas a filter with "à" only finds "à" but not "a".
• You can now turn off the automatic restauration of window positions by setting the hidden preferences "Remember Find window frame" and "Remember Results window frame" to NO. In that case, Find windows appear at the top left, while Results are centered (and cascaded) on the screen.

• A new rule "Extension" has been added for finding or excluding names with specific extensions.
• The rules "Name ends with" and "Name ends with any of" will now optionally ignore file extensions. That means that searching for names ending in "week" will find "last week.docx" now.
• The rule "File content" has been renamed to "Text content". I hope this makes it easier for non-technical users to understand its meaning.
• Fixes issues where combining text content searches with script rules could lead to errors and crashes.
• Folder sizes can now be shown in the results by option-clicking the Preference option "Calculate size of applications and packages". It will then show a dash (–) instead of a checkmark (√) to indicate this feature.
• The rule "Kind is not PDF" works now.

• Fix: When searching the main Applications folder, Apple's apps inside /System/Applications will be found, too.
• Fix: When using FAF's root mode, with Default Folder X installed, it works again as expected.

• The Find window's search location menu now shows appropriate icons with each row.
• Shows Default Folder X's "Recent Folders" and "Favorites" folders in the search location menu.
• Adds "Folder", "Directory", "Alias" and "Symlink" to the Kind rule, while removing the now-outdated "Is a folder" and "Is a Finder Alias" rules.
• Adds "does not contain" to the File Content search rule.
• Threshold (limit) values for confirmation of action commands can now be changed via the Prefs Editor app.
• Fixes a bug whereby some tooltips didn't appear for various rules in the Find window.

• Adds "Name begins with any of" rule.
• Beta fix: The Copy Paths right-click command in the results window now creates POSIX paths (with slashes) instead of the classic HFS paths (with colons).

• Fixes a crash in macOS 13 "Ventura" when showing search results.
• Fixes a crash when searching for Tags (introduced in 2.3.3b2).
• Fixes a visual glitch in the Preferences window under macOS 13.
• Using the "Reset All" button in the Preferences window won't take many seconds any more.
• Granting "Full Disk Access" in macOS 13 won't show the extra instructions below the Settings window any more.

• Fix: "In Finder Selection" won't show duplicate names any more, and will not use an excessive width.
• New scripting features, allowing for searching of folder content sizes and item count.

• Fixes a crash when deleting folders and if the option "Deleted Items Remain Visible" is not checked. Was introduced in previous beta.
• Hot Key can be set to cmd-F again, provided the option "Works only in Finder" is checked.

• New: The "File Content" rule now looks inside zip files, including .docx (Word) and .xlsx (Excel) files.
• Fix: Using Copy with the ctrl key ("JSON format") now writes the values for "dataForkSize" and "rsrcForkSize" correctly (they were switched until now).
• Fix: Using Copy with the shift key ("Copy columns") outputs the size column as a plain number instead of using units (K, M, G), so that these values can be better used in a spreadsheet.
• Fixes the toolbar items defaults for the Results window.
• New hidden pref key: "Finder selection gets front window" – if true, FAF always uses the topmost Finder window as the target, ignoring any selection in it.

• Improves the Toolbar in the Results window:
  • Shows narrower items with a pop-up menu if the space is too tight on macOS Big Sur and Monterey.
  • You can now customize the Toolbar (ctrl-click on it) and choose the older textual switches instead of the new icons.
• Fix: The rule "Kind is not Video" does now correctly exclude video files.
• Some improvements to the new Scripting feature.

• New: Highlighting can now be switched off in the View menu.
• New: Adds "is either of" rule, in case one wants to find any of a set of specific file or folder names.
• Change: The rules in the Find window use less horizontal space.
• Change: When choosing the iCloud folder as a search location, FAF will search all iCloud related application folders, not just the "iCloud Drive" folder.
• Fix: Highlighting now works for all "Name …" rules except "does not contain" and "matches RegEx".
• Fix: Beta versions do not permanently modify the Update check options any more.
• Fix: The new switch "Show Untranslated File Names" in the View menu isn't disabled any more in recent macOS versions.
• Fixes some reported crashes.

• New: Highlights the search text in the results. Still not too happy with the colors. I'm open to suggestions.
• Fix: Does not crash any more when adding a very long text to the search input.
• Fix: The popup-window for entering multiple search values (with "contains any of" and "ends with any of" rules) is not wrapping the text any more, and the field is now wider.

• Fix: "Find All" (root mode) works again.
• Fix: Scripts work on Apple Silicon (M1) Macs.

• Fix: JavaScript debugging is finally possible, but only with a special version of FAF that you'll need to download separately. Please see the updated Scripting docs.
• Fix: The app's code signature won't get invalidated any more after the first run.
• Note: Lua scripts currently don't work on Apple Silicon systems. JavaScript scripts work, though. I'll get that fixed tomorrow. As a work-around until then, you can force the app to run in Rosetta, via the "Get Info" command in Finder.

• Change: The Script rule now has verbs "matches" and "does not match".
• Fix: Single rules without text input, such as "Kind is …" enable the Find button again (got broken in previous beta).

• New: Scripted Rules allow for custom file matching with Lua or JavaScript code.
• New: The context menu in the Results window now offers a Copy Paths command.
• New: You can now paste one or more copied files or their paths directly into a results window. Before this, you had to drag the files into the window.
• Fix: When performing another search while looking at the results of a previous search, the new Results window won't pop up in front any more.
• Fix: Determining the Finder selection shouldn't stall FAF any more. (This used to happen whenever FAF was activated.)
• Fix: Searching folders now properly skips excluded folders again.
• Fix: The Dock icon won't clash any more with some other apps (such as Captin).
• Fix: Reading .paths files now properly ignores comments and JSON lines, e.g. from Scherlock.app.

• New: Unlock command removes the file locks (user & system) as well as any ACLs.
• New: The … any of rules now allow entering multiple choices separated by returns instead of spaces, which enables you to provide a list of choices that contain spaces.
• Change: The Path rule now matches on the entire path, not just on the item's enclosing path any more.