Pardon me for chiming in. I know this is a tangential answer to your question and will not help you, but every Mac Finder window has a “Search” box in the upper right corner. No add-ons needed — it’s built right into MacOS.
You can search for 150 different attributes including content of files. The files are automatically indexed with “Spotlight” and searches are almost instantaneous. You can restrict searches to specific folders or subfolders or top-level to search your entire drive.
I use this feature frequently in financial planning and review. I store all our bank and credit card statements by year in a “Personal Finance” folder. I can search all of our records for a merchant, a date, an amount, etc to locate the statement. If I need to find a purchase for $982.36, I search for that and get the info instantly.
It’s an amazing feature of Mac.
Linux has that same search box. And it is searching before you are even done typing what you want. It will give you so many related results such as hidden config files you have to narrow your search terms like Paul actually wants to do. If it is there it will find it for you...
The file manager is one tool where Linux really does shine.
That’s actually sort of the situation I’m in — trying to find specifics in old (archived) records and such.
It’d also be useful for looking up something as simple as a phrase or sentence in a book or speech transcript or letter saved to HD.
Theoretically the file search function in Windows should be able to do this, by specifying file contents and then the text to be found, but it’s only working for PDF’s and (now apparently) TXT files. I sort of “get” (understand) that for ODT files, but not being able to look inside a doc file surprised me...