How to get (Mountain Lion?) Finder to display ALL files?

Question

I'm trying to display ALL files, and it doesn't work as I would expect. What am I doing wrong?! Thanks for the help...

Open a Finder window Select your 'home' - click on your username Select File > New Smart Folder Click on + next to Save Finder displays Kind > Any - At this point I would expect a result, but nothing shows. If I select Kind > Application, I get Applications. Kind > Image gets images... So how do I display Kind > Any (presuming 'Any' is English and means 'All')?

Is the only option to re-install Snow Leopard?

Answer 1

I guess it's pretty rare to have to create a smart search that would display all files. Kind is set to Any by default, and it wouldn't make sense to start searching for all files after adding a Kind filter.

If you actually want to create a smart search that displays (a large percentage of) all files, you could try setting File visibility to Visible or Invisible:

It took several minutes for Finder to search for all files, during which it used over 100% CPU.

Even though system files are included, the results include less than half of all my files, which is probably at least partially because Spotlight doesn't index all files.