HoudahSpot - Enhance Spotlight's search powers
Apr 07, '08 07:10:00AM
Contributed by: robg
The macosxhints Rating:

[Score: 9 out of 10]
As much as I love the improvements in Spotlight in 10.5, there's one glaring omission from 10.4 that has yet to be fixed (perhaps in 10.5.3?): when you use Spotlight in the Finder, you can only see three columns of data in the results. Those three columns are Name, Kind, and Last Opened, which seems OK at first glance. Until, that is, you want to find all the large files on your hard drive. Sure, it's easy to write the query...but when you get the results, you can't sort by size, nor for that matter, can you even see the size of the found files. In 10.4, you could use the View » Show View Options menu to add in any of the standard Finder columns, and add in Size. One click later, you'd be looking at a size-sorted view of your results, making it easy to identify the space hogs. No such luck in 10.5.
Enter HoudahSpot. Among its many other skills, HoudahSpot will let you customize your search results by adding not just Finder columns, but any column that Spotlight can search on.
For example, here's a search I ran to find images that are over 20MB in size. Note that in the results, I can not only see and sort on image size, but I've also added a number of Spotlight's photography-related keys (click for a full-size version):
I wrote about HoudahSpot in detail back in February for Macworld's Mac Gems columns; since then, the program's gotten even better. A new Blitz Search feature puts a Spotlight-like icon in the menu bar, and provides keyboard shortcuts (customizable) to activate that menu or the main HoudahSpot window. This makes using HoudahSpot as convenient as Spotlight. There are tons of additional features, including the ability to create templates, using Quick Look on search results, and a full contextual menu for handling files in the results list (see above screenshot).
The only major annoyance I've found with HoudahSpot is that it's set to start searching immediately, just like Spotlight -- as soon as you start building your query, it starts searching. Once it starts searching, it becomes hard to continue building the query, as your machine is busy searching. Luckily, this live search can be disabled via HoudahSpot's preferences (another feature I wish Spotlight had).
If you miss the ability to customize your search results, or just want to do more with Spotlight, HoudahSpot is well worth the cost. (Use the free demo to decide if its feature set is worth it for your needs.)
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