Find anything

Find files, folders and notes by name or by content, narrow the results with plain words like pdf or this week, and use the command palette.

On this page
Documentation sections

The search box at the top of the window looks through your whole profile: files, folders, notes, and even the pages of the settings. It finds names, tags and, for many files, the words inside them.

Search from the top bar

  1. Click Search… at the top of the window.
  2. Type a few letters.

Results appear as you type, the most relevant first. Each result shows what it is (File, Note or Folder), where it lives, its size and its date. The words that match are highlighted.

Click a result to open it. Letter case and accents do not matter: "resume" also finds "Résumé".

Filarr ranks a match in the name first, then in the tags, then in the folder path, then in the content.

Search inside files

Filarr also finds words that only appear inside a file or a note.

The content search covers:

  • your notes;
  • text files (txt, md, csv, json, code…) and Word documents, once you have previewed them in Filarr;
  • PDF files, read in the background in the desktop app: the first 50 pages of each PDF up to 50 MB;
  • images and scanned PDFs made searchable with text recognition, see Recognize text in images and PDFs.

Narrow down with plain words

Add simple words to your search to filter the results:

  • a kind of file: pdf, docx, xlsx, jpg, png, txt…;
  • a year: 2024;
  • a period: today, this week or this month. The French words work too.

The period and the year apply to the date the file was added, and the week starts on Sunday. You can combine them with a word to find: invoice pdf 2026.

Search inside a folder

Each folder has its own Search... box, at the left of its toolbar. It filters the files of that folder by name and by tag. Start with # to look only at tags: #unpaid shows the files tagged "unpaid". See Tags, favorites and recent files.

The command palette

Press Ctrl+K or Ctrl+P to open the command palette. It searches your files and folders, and it also runs commands: create a folder, open a page of Filarr, change a setting.

  • The results are sorted in groups: Files, Actions, Settings, Navigation and Recent.
  • ↑ and ↓ move through the list, Enter runs the highlighted line, Esc closes.
  • Commands that make no sense on the current page are hidden.
  • The palette remembers your latest commands and shows your favorites with their shortcut.