MoRU - Spotlight done right

Feb 28, '06 11:02:00AM

Contributed by: robg

MoRU imageThe macosxhints Rating:
9 of 10
[Score: 9 out of 10]

Tiger only hintI've made no secret concerning my feelings about Spotlight. As a short summary, I think it's amazing technology with a badly crippled user interface, at least for those who want to do more than "find everything." Enter MoRU, which macosxhints' reader Michael Dinsmore pointed me towards. MoRU is an application designed to let you do more, a lot more, with the power of Spotlight.

MoRU lets you extend Spotlight by searching for things as you wished you could out of the box. Using its interface, it's very simple to build complex queries that simply aren't possible using Spotlight alone. Consider this (somewhate contrived) query: find every Photoshop document in my 2003 and 2005 site redesign folders that is between 100KB and 200KB in size. In Spotlight, I'd be stuck right off the bat, as I couldn't use it to search two folders using an 'or' condition, and then have some other 'and' conditions. In fact, you can't even search two folders at once using Spotlight. In MoRU, though, this is a snap (click the image for a larger version):


As you can see, the Location section is an 'or' condition (added by clicking the + sign next to the first location entry), while the following conditions are 'and' (added by clicking the Add item at lower left). As noted, this is somewhat contrived, but it shows the power of MoRU. The "Type" pop-up is a lot more flexible than Spotlight's, too, with numerous predefined options, as well as an "extract type from dropped file" choice.

Here's a more practical example to consider. I want to find all the Macworld articles I've written where I discuss the Unix command du. My Spotlight query (and results) are seen in the leftmost image below (click for larger). Those of you who understand Spotlight won't be surprised to see that it found 991 matches. That's because Spotlight can't match partial words, so it also found every document containing the words dual, during, duplicate, and many others. Ugh. Clearly not what I wanted.

Now consider the same query in MoRU, as seen below right. Since MoRU has an "exact match" option, my query returned only the nine articles in which I have actually written about the du command. Perfect!


I've barely scratched the surface of MoRU's options here, and I'm actually writing a longer piece on it for Macworld's site, if you want to read more about it (it should be done in the next week or so). MoRU isn't quite perfect; the user interface is a bit odd (you can't delete a search folder by hitting Delete, for instance, only by clicking the minus button), and it hung up when doing a large search on a friend's machine (though I've had no issues). Overal, though, it's a very well written program that does what Spotlight should have done on its own.

It's somewhat painful to pay $10 (or $18 for more than one Mac) for functionality that Apple should have included with 10.4, but that's Apple's fault, not that of the developer. I've already saved a ton of time hunting down old column references, so the money spent has been well worth it. (There's a free 30-day-trial period, so you can test it out for yourself first.)

Comments (30)


Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20060228110256821