fd is a simple, fast and user-friendly alternative to find.

While it does not seek to mirror all of find's powerful functionality, it provides sensible (opinionated) defaults for 80% of the use cases.

• Convenient syntax: fd PATTERN instead of find -iname '*PATTERN*'.
• Smart case: the search is case-insensitive by default. It switches to case-sensitive if the pattern contains an uppercase character*.
• Colorized terminal output (similar to ls).
• Ignores hidden directories and files, by default.
• Ignores patterns from your .gitignore, by default.
• Regular expressions.
• Unicode-awareness.
• The command name is 50% shorter* than find :-).

fd can colorize files by extension, just like ls. In order for this to work, the environment variable LS_COLORS has to be set. Typically, the value of this variable is set by the dircolors command which provides a convenient configuration format to define colors for different file formats. On most distributions, LS_COLORS should be set already. If you are looking for alternative, more complete (and more colorful) variants, see here or here.

A search in my home folder with ~150.000 subdirectories and ~1M files. The given options for fd are needed for a fair comparison (otherwise fd is even faster by a factor of 4 because it does not have to search hidden and ignored paths):

> time fd --hidden --no-ignore --full-path '.*[0-9]\.jpg$' > /dev/null
1,03s user 0,92s system 99% cpu 1,961 total

> time find -iregex '.*[0-9]\.jpg$' > /dev/null
3,98s user 0,84s system 99% cpu 4,832 total

Both tools found the exact same 14030 files and the results are comparable when averaged over multiple runs.

With cargo, you can clone, build and install fd with a single command:

cargo install --git https://github.com/sharkdp/fd

Note that rust version 1.16.0 or later is required. The release page of this repository also includes precompiled binaries for Linux.

cargo build --release