Locate

locate is one extremely popular Unix command that allows you to search for files in a pre-built database.

One little know fact is that Emacs provides a wrapper around the command you can invoke with M-x locate. You’ll be prompted to enter a search string and you’ll be presented with a list of matching filenames from locate’s database. Many of dired keybindings are available in the results buffer (which will be using locate-mode major mode).

If you’d like you may change the command invoked by Emacs to supply the results by altering the locate-command variable. Here’s how you can start using OS X’s mdfind (the command-line interface to Spotlight) instead of locate:

(setq locate-command "mdfind")

Obviously any command that takes a string argument and returns a list of files would do here. In all likelihood you’ll never want to use anything other than the default locate command, though.