How to List All Applications on Mac

This step-by-step guide explains how to list all apps on mac. It covers the required setup, the main actions, and the checks that help prevent common problems.

This method is very simple, just open the Apps app, usually located in the sidebar, at the top of the hard drive or in the Home folder (the folder has your name on it). You can select the List Button in the top bar to see everything on the list easily.

This directory does not list all apps on the hard drive, so if there is an app in the Download Folder, it will not show up here.

Smart Folders are great, they are like saved searches that you can pin to Finder's sidebar. To search all apps, follow the steps below.

Create a new smart folder from any Finder Window by selecting File> New Smart Folder From the top menu bar.

By default, it will search by file name but you can change it to Kind And App .

You will see the folder quickly fills the search app. If you want to save this smart folder, select Save In the top right corner, name it and choose a place to save.

By default, it will be saved in the Save Searches Folder but can be saved anywhere you want and added to the sidebar for easy access.

The System Information app has a tab showing the. App files installed on the system. Open the app by holding down the Options Key and clicking on the Apple logo, clicking System Information .

Scroll down to Software> Apps And wait a minute for it to search the drive, listing the app. This list includes all the files with the. App extension, including system and internal apps, so editing these files may be harmful to Macs.

If you want an easy-to-edit app file path list, you can search the hard drive using the Terminal command. Here we will use the Find And flag command --iname To search by file name. The syntax for finding files with the. App file extension is as follows:

 sudo find / -iname * .app 

Open the Terminal app by clicking on it on the Dock, past the above command and press Enter . This process may take a while because it will produce an extremely long list of system and internal apps, so you should turn the output into a file.

 sudo find / -iname * .app> filename 

This method will search the app on both the root directory and on the hard drive, so you will see lots of repetitive folders from apps within the app, such as Xcode's internal app. You can remove these repeating apps with Sed Commands and regular expressions to search for matches, delete the. App file inside the. App file.

 sed -i '/.app.*.app/d' filename 

The above command will delete all entries that match the search feature from the list of apps you have created. This operation modifies the file directly, so be careful when running it.