Cardinal Search

About

Cardinal is a file search app for macOS, described as the fastest and most accurate tool of its kind. It can be installed with Homebrew (brew install --cask cardinal-search) or downloaded from GitHub Releases. The app supports multiple languages, which can be switched from the ⚙️ button in the status bar.

Cardinal uses an Everything-compatible search syntax alongside classic substring and prefix matching. Users can combine terms with spaces (AND), filter by extension (*.pdf), size (size:>100MB), folder (in:/Users), or Finder tags (tag:ProjectA;ProjectB, where ; acts as OR). It also supports exact phrases, content search (content:"..."), path-based searches, and globstar (**) for searching through subfolders. Full syntax details are in doc/pub/search-syntax.md.

The app includes keyboard shortcuts for navigating and acting on results, such as Cmd+Shift+Space to toggle the window, Space for Quick Look previews, Cmd+O to open results, Cmd+R to reveal them in Finder, and Cmd+C or Cmd+Shift+C to copy files or paths. Search history can be cycled with the arrow keys in the search bar. The project requires macOS 12+ to build and is released under the MIT license.