MacOS applications install slightly differently than Windows applications. Since they are almost always single .app records, you can move them around your hard drive much easier. Next, We tell you how to locate those you lost.
From the applications folder
This method is obvious: just open your Applications folder. In general, you can find this in the sidebar, at the top of your hard drive or in your Home folder (the one with her name). You can press the button “Ready” in the top bar to see everything in an easy-to-read list.
Despite this, this will not list all the apps on your disk, so if you have an application that you left in your Downloads folder, will not show here.
RELATED: How to launch applications on your Mac
Best method: smart folders
Smart folders are wonderful. They are like saved searches that you can pin to the Finder sidebar. Here, we will search all applications.
Create a new smart folder from any Finder window by selecting File> New Smart Folder from the top menu bar.
This will open what looks like a search window. You can add a new rule by clicking the button + next to “Keep”. There will be a drop down menu that will allow you to select the rule by which the smart folder will search. The default option will search by filename.
But you want to change “Name” a “Guy” and specify “App”.
You will see that the folder quickly fills up with Applications. If you want to save this smart folder, click on “Keep” in the upper right corner. Enter a name and choose where to save it.
The default location is a folder “Saved searches”, but you can save it anywhere you want. Either way, will be added to the sidebar for easy access.
Use of system information
The System Information application has a tab to display each .app file installed on your system. Open the application by holding down the Option key and clicking on the Apple logo; the first item will be System Information.
Scroll down to Software> Applications and wait a minute to search your disk and complete the list. This list contains all .app records, including internal and system, therefore modify them at your own risk.
Command line options
If you want an easily modifiable list of application file paths for technical reasons, you can search your drive with a terminal command. we will use find, and use the -iname flag to search files by name. The syntax to search .app extensions is:
sudo find / -iname *.app
Open the Terminal application by clicking on it in the Dock, paste above command and hit enter. The search will take a while and will generate an extremely long list that includes many internal and system applications. We suggest to pipe the output to a file.
sudo find / -iname *.app > filename
This looks in the root directory and includes everything on your hard drive. You will notice many repeating directories of applications within applications, like internal Xcode apps. You can get rid of these results with sed and a some regex to pair and remove .app files within .app records:
sed -i '/.app.*.app/d' filename
This will remove all entries that match the pattern from the app list you created. This modifies the file directly, therefore be careful not to run it on anything else.
