Finder / Spotlight search on Mac isn't great. It usually gives me a lot of junk (python caches, irrelevant system files, etc), instead of what I'm looking for. So I decided to implement my own filtering + search, with an extension to Raycast.

Key features

- Search is limited to my Documents/ and Downloads/ folders – where 95% of my relevant files are.

- Also, there are a lot of Claude-generated exclusion patterns!

- Filtering is simple – I'm just doing it by sub/string match.

Finder does have a lot of niceties (previewing files, looking at metadata, etc). So the default behaviour is 'hit enter' to open in Finder. Or 'Cmd + enter' opens the file directly.