![]() It also has at least one unique feature: it can search Mail’s mailboxes in Catalina and Big Sur, something which Finder search no longer supports. For anyone fed up with the Finder’s steadily more puny front-end to Spotlight search, this should be your first choice. ![]() These are both entirely dependent on the Spotlight indexes, but provide a far superior interface which supports defaults, templates, logical combinations of criteria, multiple excluded locations – the list of features appears almost endless. HoudahSpot is more expensive, at around $/€/£ 34, and is the more powerful and sophisticated sibling to Tembo, which is slightly less than half the price. In this case, it did search EXIF metadata, but doesn’t cover material stored in extended attributes, for instance. However, it doesn’t appear to support customised search of the Spotlight index, based for instance on specific metadata. The result is a useful composite of hits achieved using both techniques, which is the best of both worlds. It tackles this in an interest way, using Spotlight’s index first when that’s enabled and available, to return a quick set of hits, then makes its way steadily through its own content search, again primarily of text-based formats. Thomas Tempelmann’s Find Any File (FAF), which costs around $/€/£ 6 direct or in the App Store is primarily a tool for searching file systems, but also throws in basic content search for free. Although content search doesn’t appear to be its primary purpose, it includes a simple set of controls which allow you to search for text in text-based files. The free app EasyFind, by DEVONtechnologies, is Spotlight-free. As there currently appears to be no alternative to Spotlight’s index, search tools which don’t use it are going to be at a severe disadvantage, both in terms of performance and coverage. Grinding your way through a million or more files inspecting each for a string of characters inevitably takes a very long time, and is entirely dependant on gaining access to their contents. ![]() This article looks at what’s available.īefore going any further, it’s important to establish that, in general, searching modern disks containing 500 GB or more of files, there’s nothing better than using an index. There are many possible causes of failure to find, which I will examine in another article, but common to both criticisms is the need to find a replacement. The app is using the powerful Spotlight engine, but makes its own computations and allows you to set up countless tools to refine the queries and find what you were looking for faster.The two most common criticisms of Spotlight search are that it fails to find items which we believe are there, and that its searches return too many hits to let us locate the item that we want. HoudahSpot offers a wide range of sorting capabilities that can help you find specific files in no time. Note that the results list includes all the information known to Spotlight, but also additional data provided by HoudahSpot. ![]() HoudahSpot allows you to create rules for a wide range of file attributes and for all the metadata indexed by Spotlight. In addition, you can choose to exclude certain folders. You can specify what are you looking for and where, and limit the results list by applying various rules. Fast search tool designed to help you speed-up and refine your queriesįor more complicated tasks, you might want to navigate to the HoudahSpot main window and take advantage of everything the application has to offer. At the same time, you can activate basic criteria and match the query text to the file name, to any text content, or to included comments. In the HoudahSpot Blitz Search window you get to perform quick searching by using different search templates. The app places a small icon in your status bar menu which provides access to the Blitz Search Window (a simplified version) or to the HoudahSpot menu (you can activated through a right click). HoudahSpot stays out of your way at all times but you can easily access its interface any time you want. HoudahSpot is a simple Mac app built on top of Spotlight that can take various elements into account when trying to find files and folders. Apple’s Spotlight engine can help you find files in no time but does not allow you to set up multiple rules for your searches, which translates in longer queries.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |