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. It is also possible to share the found files over the Internet, using the operating system's mail or message capabilities.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. When you find what you are looking for, you can reveal a file's location on a Finder window, open it, delete it or preview it. It is also possible to choose a different operator, like all or any words, phrase or Boolean combined with Wildcards. If you forgot the name of a file, you can simply type a word from its contained text and the application will find it. Additionally, you can set up a few filters, for a precise searching process.īesides searching for your keywords in file and folder names, EasyFind can also search for your keywords within your files. Once EasyFind is up and running, you can just type the name of a file in a search field, hit the Return key or a Search button and the application will instantly display all files with that name, beneath the search field. The application works straight out of the box, so you don't have to make any initial settings or wait for an indexing process to finish. With its advanced Boolean operators, the application is capable of finding any file on your local disk instantly, by name or contents, without indexing anything. Although Spotlight doesn't leave much to be desired, EasyFind brings many improvements. If you are in a hurry to find a file, third party applications will always work better than what your operating system has to offer, even if you are using a Mac.
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