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.
Houdahspot alternative free#
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 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.
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