Look Up

Look up is a Spotlight-like functionality built into Marta.

There are two versions of the action: Look up (⌘P) searches globally, while Look up here (⌘⌥P) limits results to the current folder contents.

By default, Look Up displays files and folders whose name matches the query. However, the action supports a lot of useful predicates.

Simple predicates are added by typing their names. For instance, you can search folders with the name “Projects” by writing Folder↵ Projects. When you first type the word “Folder”, the dialog will suggest adding the “Folder” predicate. Press it, and then enter the query text (“Projects” in our case).

Here is the complete list of simple predicates (case-insensitive):

• Folder / Directory
• File (matches regular files, not folders)
• Archive (.zip, .tar.gz, .dmg)
• Disk Image (.dmg)
• Text (.txt, .md)
• Plain Text (.txt)
• RTF (.rtf)
• HTML (.html)
• XML (.xml)
• Source Code (.java, .swift)
• Image (.png, .jpg)
• Video / Movie (.mov)
• Audio / Music (.mp3, .wav)
• Executable (.app, .class)
• Application (.app)
• Bundle (.app, .framework, .bundle)
• ZIP (.zip)

Complex predicates have the syntax variable operator argument. Such predicates allow matching files based on their title, author, content, or other attributes.

Here is the list of available variables (case-insensitive):

• Author / Artist
• Description
• Name
• Content
• Title
• UTI (e.g. public.image, list of UTIs).
• Album
• Composer
• Lyricist
• Genre
• Contact
• Email
• Encoder
• Keyword
• Organization
• Participant
• Project
• Publisher
• Recipient
• City
• Comment
• Copyright
• Country
• Creator
• FinderComment

And here is the list of supported operators with a list of equivalents (also case-insensitive):

• equalsTo / = / == / is / equal / equalTo / equals
• notEqualTo / != / ≠, isNot
• contains / contain / has
• like / ~= / ≈
• startsWith / hasPrefix
• endsWith / hasSuffix

For example, here is how you can search for songs by Brian Finnegan, a great tin whistle player: Audio↵ Author is "Brian Finnegan"↵. We firstly added the “Audio” predicate as we are interested only in audio files. Then we added the “Author” predicate, saying we want only files whose author is exactly “Brian Finnegan”.

An alternative would be Audio↵ Author has Finnegan↵ (yet we might find other music by people with the same last name). Note that if the value consists of only one word, there is no need for quotes.

🐧 Look up also understands absolute paths (paths starting with /). It even supports completion for them so that you can use Look up instead of Go to path for the local file system.

⚠️ Look up uses the Spotlight caches, which may not be available for some directories (such as a user-local ~/Library).