/Finder

/Finder is a World of Warcraft AddOn that lets you search for any item in the game (including unobtainable / debugging items), and show an item link for it.

Incompatibility note

Unfortunately, /Finder uses the exact same commands as the "Search" module included with the Prat chat addon. This means, if you have Prat installed, with the Search module enabled, the two default /Finder commands /find and /search will not work. You have two options:

Disable the Search module within Prat. (/prat - Module Control tab - set the "Search" module to "Don't Load").
Use the long and much less convenient version of the /Finder search command: /finder search 'search term'

Usage

(Make sure you've built your item cache first, see Cache down below for how that works.)

Using /Finder is super easy, all you need to do is type /find 'search term' or /search 'search term', and the addon will spit out some search results in your main chat tab. These are just two different commands that do the same thing, use whichever seems more natural to you!

Search Results

Right now, the addon won't print more than 20 results. Try narrowing down the search if you get that many.

The 'search term' can be anything you want, including spaces. The search term is NOT case-sensitive, everything is converted to lowercase.

Finally, the search is looking for an exact partial match - it does not account for mis-spellings.

For example:

/search searing arrw will NOT find [Bow of Searing Arrows]

however

/search searing arr WILL find [Bow of Searing Arrows]

Hopefully in the future I will add fuzzy searching, allowing for missing or mis-typed letters!

Cache

Before you use /Finder for the first time, you have to build the item cache it uses for searching. This is simple, automatic, and happens in the background! To trigger a cache rebuild, simply type:

/finder rebuild (Notice the slash command here is /finder, not /find!)

/Finder will then request from the server and store information about every item in the game, one by one. This should take about 35 seconds by default (see Config options on GitHub). The reason it takes a while is because WoW servers will disconnect any client making too many requests per second, so it has to be done more slowly! The rebuild process will tell you when it's finished.

If the rebuild progress updates are annoying you, you can mute them using /finder hush, this will mute (or unmute) the messages for this particular rebuild. It will always tell you when it's done, regardless of mute status.

You can actually use /find or /search immediately, however until the rebuild is completed, the search results may be incomplete, or empty alltogether.

Finally, you can stop the current rebuild using /finder stop/abort/cancel. This will immediately stop the rebuild, leaving it partially complete. Unfortunately, for now, there's no way to resume it, and you have to start over to complete it. The addon will complain about an incomplete cache until you do a complete rebuild!

Please note: You absolutely must rebuild the cache after any major game updates, since these often add or remove items. The cache has no way to maintain itself, so you must remember to rebuild it after a big update (like a content patch). In the future, /Finder might be able to detect major updates, and slowly rebuild itself in the background. For now, that's on you.

More information

For a more elaborate explanation of things, including some configuration options, head over to the GitHub page.