Spotlight enhancements

On or about 4/10/07 9:24 AM, thus spake "Harro de Jong" <hdjongtriview.nl>:

> Matt Neuburg created an alternative interface for Spotlight that gives you
> more flexibility without having to resort to the command line:

Indeed, my freeware app, NotLight, gives you access to *all* of Spotlight's
query features. Outrageously, NONE of Apple's GUI interfaces (the Spotlight
Menu, the Spotlight Window, and the Finder Search Window) gives you access
to these.

Behind the scenes, a Spotlight query has a sophisticated syntax. It is made
up a series of search terms. Each term is a comparison on exactly *one*
piece of metadata (e.g. the file's name), which you get to specify. Each
term can start or end with a wildcard character, and can ignore diacritics
or not, ignore case or not, and be word-based or not. Comparison between the
term and the target can use various operators: not just equality, but also
greater-than, less-than, not-equal, and so on. These comparisons can be
assembled using AND, OR, and NOT into larger searches. And finally, the
entire search can be limited to a particular folder.

You can do all that using the command line (mdfind). The purpose of NotLight
is merely to provide an easier way for people to assemble and save true
Spotlight queries (and to perform the search and deal with the results).

It was never really intended for public release; I simply got sick of the
fact that Spotlight itself was so good, under the hood, but Apple's
interfaces to it were so crappy, so I wrote my own interface so I could
actually *use* Spotlight. I use NotLight constantly, every day. I released
it as freeware so that you can use it if you like as well.

There are several other alternative Spotlight front ends. I have not tried
any of them, but I daresay *any* of them is better than Apple's cruddy
interfaces.

I should add, however, that even NotLight can't work around Spotlight's own
failures, because NotLight *is* Spotlight. For example, there are certain
file types, and certain directories on your hard disk, that Spotlight
absolutely will not index, and there is nothing you can do about this
because that stuff is hard-wired (no preference can alter it). For this
reason, I sometimes end up searching with EasyFind, which is slow (because
it doesn't use SpotLight) but complete (because it just searches the hard
disk directly).

m.

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On 4/11/07, Matt Neuburg <matttidbits.com> wrote:
> On or about 4/10/07 9:24 AM, thus spake "Harro de Jong" <hdjongtriview.nl>:
>
> > Matt Neuburg created an alternative interface for Spotlight that gives you
> > more flexibility without having to resort to the command line:
>
> Indeed, my freeware app, NotLight, gives you access to *all* of Spotlight's
> query features. Outrageously, NONE of Apple's GUI interfaces (the Spotlight
> Menu, the Spotlight Window, and the Finder Search Window) gives you access
> to these.

Erm, ok, I'll bite. What does Apple's "Raw Query" not give you access to?

Or are you saying that at that point, it's no longer really a GUI interface?

--
<http://2blog.kreme.com/>

An altogether different indexer, and I find a more useful one, is FoxTrot by CTM <www.ctmdev.com>. FoxTrot indexes files overnight instead of on the fly but if I have just created a file, I can usually find it, so I do not find that a limitation.