cmd-f find box text is shared between applications

The Finder is comprised of several pasteboards and by default, all of our normal copy/paste operations use pasteboard general. However, there is also a Find pasteboard, and when you use the Edit menu > Find > Use Selection for Find, it writes that text to the Find pasteboard. The last content placed on the Find pasteboard behaves just like the last content placed on the General pasteboard and remains until overwritten.

Since each Cocoa-based application has this Edit menu > Find functionality, it cannot differentiate which application placed the content on the Find pasteboard, and when you launch the specific application's Find utility, it queries the Find pasteboard and retrieves the content found there because it could have been placed there by that application's own Use Selection for Find. This is not a bug.

To avoid using this common Find pasteboard across multiple open applications, select the text that you wish to find in the specific application, copy it to the regular pasteboard, and then paste that text into that application's Find window. This avoids the Find pasteboard, though it replaces whatever was on the general pasteboard.

The Terminal allows one to copy and paste to and from the Find area of the clipboard, but these must specifically request it:

pbcopy -pboard find <<<"dogcow"
pbpaste -pboard find
"dogcow"



To clear the Find pasteboard and break the chain of each application using the last contents copied there, perform this Terminal command:

pbcopy -pboard find <<<""



Yes, it is intentional, and yes, it does seem more like a bug.