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Spotlight Alternative (Free)
Hi,
I was leery of running Spotlight on an FCP system and I didn’t want to have to turn it off on a drive everytime I swapped a big SATA drive. The problem was when I turned it off searching for files didn’t work. Easyfind works very well and I don’t have to worry about Spotlight running on a drive I don’t need to have indexed (a drive with big media files) or kicking in during a capture.
You can use Spotless to turn Spotlight on and off:
https://www.fixamacsoftware.com/software/spot/You can use Easyfind for searches:
https://www.devon-technologies.com/products/freeware/applications.php
EasyFind is an alternative to or supplement of Sherlock and finds files, folders or contents in any file without the need for indexing — and therefore immediately. This is especially useful if you are tired of slow or impossible indexing, outdated or corrupted indices or if you are just looking for missing features like case sensitive or insensitive search, Boolean operators, wildcards or searching for phrases. In addition, EasyFind uses multithreading and is therefore very responsive even with multiple search processes running, provides contextual menus and Mac OS X services and displays the location of each item in a separate column for a better overview. Finally EasyFind uses little memory, supports drag-and-drop and the clipboard and optionally finds invisible items or items within packages.Version 3.5 implements its own wildcard interpreter, supports wildcards specifying or excluding a range or choice of characters (“[…]”) and displays the full pathname for found items in tooltips.
Best Wishes,
Mitch
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4 Replies
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Quick question – when you diable spotlight and use easy find, does it seach e-mail in the Mail application? I used TCC to kill spotlight and was unalbe to do any sort of search in Mail, making it difficult to find stuff.
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hello…
mail itself has a search tool – you can put it in the menu bar next to get mail, reply, etc…
i can’t even remember if it’s in the toolbar by default, but if not, you can add it via the traditional menu customization system…
sitruc
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Thanks Curtis – I do have the search tool in Mail but when I disabled SL I lost the ability to search my mail. Maybe I did something wrong?
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hello…
ya know what? i wouldn’t be surprised if they re-wrote the mail search to piggyback on the spotlight thing…i doubt you’re doing anything wrong after all…
that sucks if you don’t want spotlight enabled…they are having a few growing pains with tiger, aren’t they?
sitruc
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