SpotInside: A Solid Spotlight Alternative
I have a love-hate relationship with Spotlight, OS X’s convenient and useful, but immensely frustrating search utility. Apple introduced Spotlight with OS X 10.4 Tiger, and tweaked it considerably in OS 10.5 Leopard.
Having a search engine ready and waiting all the time is seductive, and Spotlight is nice to have, but falls short of Apple’s “Find anything, anywhere, fast” claim, and I particularly dislike its find-as-you-type initiating searches from the first keystroke. I was told I wouldn’t mind any more once I got an Intel Mac. Well, I now have a Core 2 Duo and still mind.
“Too Much Information”
Spotlight is also afflicted with a Google-esque “too much information” syndrome, even with a fair bit of my hard drive’s contents excluded from indexing. It also doesn’t do simple file name searches.
No path information is revealed in Spotlight’s results window. You must resort to Get Info or Reveal in Finder. No preview of file contents either, you can’t refine your search within results, and Spotlight doesn’t support phrase searches, at least not conveniently and efficiently. You can muck around using quotation marks in the search field, but I’ve had indifferent success with that.
Some have praised the changes in Leopard Spotlight, but I actually think I preferred Spotlight in Tiger, with its readout of the number of search returns and, in my opinion, more convenient and functional “Show All” panel.
Some Alternatives
In a recent article, MacFixIt cites some of these Spotlight shortcomings and proposes alternatives like Google Desktop, Easy Find, Foxtrot, and even Command-line searching.
I’ve tried Google Desktop and find it just too ponderous, resource-hogging, and overbearing. Devon Technologies’ Easy Find is a nice little app, free like Google Desktop, but more hassle to use than Spotlight, and not being indexed — slower. I can’t comment on CTM Development’s 29 Euro Foxtrot utility as I haven’t used it. The Command-line is largely terra incognita for me — not a place I want to go for quick searches in any case.
Where I do go mostly is to SpotInside, a Spotlight-enhancer that layers several elements on top of the Spotlight engine: results preview in the interface window, decently efficient phrase searching, much more conveniently configurable and sortable results organization, searches within results, and searching doesn’t commence before you bid it to.
Well Worth the Effort
SpotInside is yet another application to run, but it starts up almost instantly, is fast, and adds little system overhead. With such a well-conceived and convenient interface, it’s well worth the extra effort.
Unlike Spotlight and Leopard’s Quick Look, SpotInside can use the Find panel and select text in your search result. It also conveniently highlights your keywords in search results. It doesn’t search as extensive a range of file types as Spotlight (eg: music files and email messages), but I’d argue that’s a good thing. For finding words or phrases within text files, PDFs and the like, it’s the best tool I’ve tried.
SpotInside searches ever major text document format (including Pages). It can display PDF previews as images or as plain text, and will also find the folder the desired document is located in with a click of the “Reveal in Finder” button, and open it with the “Launch” button. There is a Zoom slider for adjusting the size of the preview contents.
I haven’t found another desktop search engine that has the uncanny ability to efficiently and quickly zero in on just what I’m looking for, as SpotInside does. If you’re frustrated with Spotlight, or even if you’re not, SpotInside is worth checking out.
SpotInside requires OS X 10.4 or later, and is free.
Tweet This (11)
Pitman on July 28th, 2009 at 6:38 pm
Thanks for the great tip. I just downloaded it and it works nicely.
max on July 28th, 2009 at 7:55 pm
You can also look into FileBuddy. A long-time application that offers searches by file name and many other criteria.
Also, Path Finder can search by spotlight or by file.
co on July 29th, 2009 at 12:42 am
wrt to path in spotlight, you can just point to the result and the path will show up…i am sure u know this already but just want to pt that out…
CoSTa on July 29th, 2009 at 2:19 am
Leap – worth every penny. Try it and you’ll be amazed how actually good it is.
Dave M. on July 29th, 2009 at 6:28 am
It’s a shame you guys sensor comments here. I guess I’m not surprised with all the bad facts in the posts on this sites. I mean two posts in a row with facts that are just totally wrong… Ah well. One less blog to read.
Staff Comment Josh Pigford, TheAppleBlog on July 29th, 2009 at 6:54 am
Errr….what? Since you aren’t reading our blog anymore, I doubt you’ll actually see my response, but what are you saying we censored? We delete comments that are vulgar/trolling/hateful, but that’s it. Sometimes comments get (incorrectly) caught by our spam filters, but like I said, we don’t censor comments.
jimmy on July 29th, 2009 at 1:40 pm
hear hear re the search as you type – i’ve got something like 2tb of data for tiger to sift through and it’s slow on a dual xeon. Useful but slow
at home i use a macbook running leopard and although speedier, the results display is very lacking i find it very hard to fine tune the results to my needs
Staff Comment Josh Pigford, TheAppleBlog on July 29th, 2009 at 2:37 pm
Spotlight is just always hit-or-miss for me…which ultimately means I can’t trust it so I end up not using it very often.
Staff Comment Charles Moore, TheAppleBlog on July 29th, 2009 at 9:45 pm
Yes, Spotlight’s pathname on mouseover feature can be useful, but Spotinside gives you the path info along with created and modified dates and the file size all in the main info window for every result showing simultaneously.
Not sure what the reader’s point is about find-as-you-type. All I said about that is that I don’t like it., and prefer Spotinside’s polite waiting until I give it the go-ahead.
CM
invinciblegavin on July 31st, 2009 at 5:51 am
Spotlight is a very powerful search tool, and does many of the thing you say it does. Path information is revealed in a tooltip by resting your cursor above the item in the results list. Also, search results can be refund easily. For example, if I was searching for an email message cotaining a phrase I would key in: kind:email “phrase text”. I could then narrow my result by adding date:1/1/2009-31/1/2009.
Spotlight is great when you know how to use it.
Pierre Bernard on August 3rd, 2009 at 2:40 pm
Tooting my own horn: do check out HoudahSpot. It has all of the features SpotInside has and then some: unlimited criteria, boolean operators, unlimited columns, templates, preferred template,…
Mahlsdorfer Ami on November 23rd, 2009 at 3:30 am
Actually, IMO the best feature of Spotinside is that it automatically displays previews of the found documents with the hits highlighted, like Copernic or X1 in Windows. I’m evaluating HoudahSpot and I haven’t found a way to make it do that. Am I overlooking something? Once HoudahSpot does that, you will have the perfect Spotlight front-end, sir. :-)
Pierre Bernard on November 23rd, 2009 at 4:37 am
In HoudahSpot this feature is called “Text Preview”. You may find it in the “Windows” menu
Mahlsdorfer Ami on November 23rd, 2009 at 4:50 am
Thank you — I’m sold!
พระเครื่อง on November 16th, 2009 at 9:04 am
Thank you for this great information.
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