Seek David Shnayder

Seek

Seek is a cross-platform command-line file searcher built as a faster alternative to find.

It uses a concurrent worklist algorithm that is orders of magnitude faster than conventional file-tree walks. There are no indexes. No daemons. No warm-up ritual. Just point it at a directory and let it rip.

Why Seek

• Searches full paths, not just filenames.
• Supports both plain substring search and regex.
• Works well for source trees, logs, monorepos, and large developer workspaces.
• Ships as a clean .NET global tool.

Seek is for developers, power users, and anyone tired of waiting on filesystem search.

Benchmark

A real-world full-path regex benchmark for mp4 paths under the root directory showed Seek running 2.5-3.5x faster than rust-based fd:

Tech Stack

• C# on .NET 10
• Console UI by PrettyConsole
• CLI and argument parsing by ConsoleAppFramework

Install

• winget: winget install dusrdev.Seek
• GitHub: latest release binaries
• NuGet: dotnet tool install Seek --global

On supported runtimes, NuGet resolves Seek's native AOT package for the current machine automatically. A framework-dependent Seek.any fallback package is also published for unsupported or generic environments.

Agent Skill

This repo includes a reusable agent skill for path search with seek:

• Skill path: .agents/skills/seek-file-search

The bundled metadata is directly usable by Codex and other agents that understand the same skill layout. For agents that use a different schema, the skill content can still be copied and adapted.

To install it into a global skills folder, copy that directory into your agent skills directory, for example:

cp -R .agents/skills/seek-file-search ~/.agents/skills/seek-file-search

The skill guides agents to prefer seek for filesystem path lookup instead of find, fd, or ls | grep, and to use rg only for file-content search. Cursor, Claude, and other agents with different skill formats will require user-side customization for now.

Usage

The positional argument is the search query.

By default, Seek matches against the path relative to --root and prints results relative to that root.

Search from the current directory:

seek report

Search from a specific root:

seek report --root /path/to/root

Example output:

src/Seek.Cli/Program.cs
tests/Seek.Core.Tests/FileSystemSearchTests.cs

Emit absolute paths instead:

seek report --root /path/to/root --absolute

Regex search:

seek ".*\\.cs$" --regex

Only files:

seek report --files

Only directories:

seek report --directories

Short flags:

seek report -f
seek report -d

Machine-readable output for piping:

seek report --null | xargs -0 rm

--null always emits plain absolute paths terminated by \0, so it is safe for piping even when names contain spaces or newlines.

Built-in delete command:

seek delete report
seek delete report --apply
seek delete ".*\\.tmp$" --regex --apply

seek delete uses the same search-selection options as the default search command: --regex, --case-sensitive, --hidden, --system, --files, --directories, and --root.

Without --apply, seek delete prints the final candidate list and a No changes were made... hint. With --apply, it deletes each candidate sequentially and prints an OK or FAIL status line for each path.

Add --no-progress to disable the live progress bar during apply runs.

Other useful options:

• --case-sensitive
• --absolute to emit absolute paths instead of root-relative paths
• -f, --files to emit only file matches
• -d, --directories to emit only directory matches
• --plain for plain paths without ANSI escape sequences
• --null for NUL-terminated absolute paths that are safe to pipe into tools like xargs -0
• seek delete ... --apply for built-in deletion after preview
• seek delete ... --apply --no-progress for durable status lines without the live progress bar
• -h, --hidden to include hidden files
• -s, --system to include system files

Build From Source

dotnet build Seek.slnx
dotnet test --solution Seek.slnx