ff is a fairly fast highly ergonomic file name search CLI built specifically for Windows.

I was not happy with using Windows find and using Gnuwin32 and piping ls -A -R into grep sucks.

Syntax

# Basic syntax
ff [queries...] [!exclusions...] [options]

# Search current directory for "Controller" and ".cs" files
ff .cs Controller

# Search a specific directory using -p
ff .json -p ../src

Features

• Ergonomic Defaults: Just type what you want to find. ff .cs automatically matches C# files, and ff !obj/ prunes the object directory.
• Pretty Fast: Doesn't win any speed competitions, but plenty usable for day to day.
• Piping & The UNIX Philosophy: ff plays nicely with pipes. You can chain multiple ff commands together to progressively narrow down your results.
• Streaming: Results are streamed by default. Use -b or --block to wait for the entire search to complete before printing.
• Optional TUI: While the main focus is the CLI, you can use --tui to boot a basic TUI. Try out your queries and see it update in real time.

Ergonomics

Prepend ! to patterns you want to exclude from results. Append / to target directories specifically.

# Finds all .cs files, completely skipping the heavy obj and bin folders
ff .cs !obj/ !bin/ !*Test*

Piping

You can easily pipe the output of one ff command into another to filter down massive lists of files step-by-step:

# Finds all json files, and then filters that list down to only ones with "appsettings" in the name
ff .json | ff appsettings

Flags

Flag	Full Name	Description
-p	--path <dir>	Explicitly sets the directory to search. Defaults to ./.
-l	--local	Local search only. Disables recursion so it only searches the top level directory.
-r	--regex	Treats your search queries as Regular Expressions rather than wildcard strings.
-c	--case-sensitive	Enables strict case-sensitive matching for the search query.
-b	--block	Blocks streaming output and waits until the entire search finishes before printing it all as one joined chunk.
-S	--no-symlinks	Prevents traversing or matching Windows Reparse Points (symlinks/junctions).
-a	--all	Includes hidden and system files in the search (these are skipped by default to save time).
-t	--type <type>	Filters by type. Use -t f for files only, or -t d for directories only.
	--logic <string>	Use advanced boolean logic (&, |, !) with placeholders {0}, {1} mapping to positional queries.
	--tui	Launches the interactive Terminal User Interface (TUI) for real-time searching and folder navigation.
-v	--version	Prints the version number.
-h	--help	Displays the help menu with all available options and examples.
-?	--help	Same as -h.

Examples

Find all json files in your project:

ff *.json

Find all .txt files but ignore the node_modules and .git folders:

ff .txt !node_modules/ !.git/

Look for a file in your parent directory, but don't recurse down into its children:

ff README -p ../ -l

Advanced Examples

Regex searching for specific configuration files (JSON or YAML) while skipping heavy directories:

ff !bin/ !obj/ -r ".*\.(json|yaml|yml)$"

Advanced Boolean Logic Searches: For highly specific queries, you can supply a custom logic string. When using --logic, all unflagged arguments become numbered inputs {0}, {1}, etc. (Note: && and & are supported, as well as || and |)

# Finds files that match ".cs" OR ".json", but NOT "Tests"
ff --logic "({0} | {1}) & !{2}" .cs .json Tests

If you make a mistake in your logic string, ff catches it before running the search and gives you a nice error:

> ff --logic "{0} | {1}" abc
Error parsing command:
ff --logic "{0} | {1}" abc
-------------------^
Logic expression references out-of-bounds index {1}. Only 1 queries were provided.

Optional: Interactive Visual Searching If you want to visualize a query before cementing it, you can launch the TUI. Use Alt+Up/Alt+Down to navigate through directories, and press Enter to dump the results back to the CLI so they can be piped into other tools.

> ff --tui
# (Interactive UI opens. After selecting your results and hitting Enter, it dumps to stdout)
D:\Repos\ff\ff.Core\Core.cs
D:\Repos\ff\ff.Tui\Program.cs

Screenshot of TUI