All three apps were able to search a folder in iCloud Drive as well as one in ~/Documents. EasyFind performed worst of all, and only found the term in three files: RTF, plain text, and HTML. Strangely, Spotlight, even when accessed through HoudahSpot, failed to find the search term in the RTF file, but found all the others. Only FAF, with its combination of Spotlight and data inspection, found all the documents in the test set. Searching document contents was surprisingly troubled.
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All apps were given Full Disk Access in the Privacy tab before use, although on this occasion I don’t think that any needed that for the tests.Īll Spotlight searches were essentially instantaneous, but searching ~/Documents in EasyFind took 21 seconds, and 37 seconds in Find Any File (that reduces to 27 seconds when using the latest beta-release). Test documents were stored in their own folder in ~/Documents, the total size of which is 60 GB for 32,236 items, on the fast internal SSD of an iMac Pro. Two notes in the Notes app, one stored locally, the other in iCloud.Two email messages, one in a Mail mailbox, the other in a Postbox mailbox.Two documents with the term saved in metadata, one in the EXIF Device data of a JPEG image, the other in the Keywords extended attribute of a plain text file.Five documents in RTF, PDF, plain text, HTML and Word docx formats.
To test the efficacy of each search, I saved the term syzygy999 with a suffix such as a inside a modest surrounding document into eleven different locations: HoudahSpot has an optional link to work with Alfred, which should be an interesting combination. Alfred is a very different beast, and compelling in many other ways. If you’ve been frustrated with the weak facilities in the Mail app, HoudahSpot is again first choice.įinally, I’m not going to look at Alfred, although it does provide a front end to Spotlight search. 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.
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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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