10-09-2006, 05:50 PM
Just stumbled onto this one last week, why couldn't Apple make spotlight work like this!
NotLight
A simple Spotlight front-end substitute. I wrote this because I got sick and tired of Tiger's lousy Spotlight interface. The magnifying-glass menu is a fake menu; it behaves oddly, and doesn't show all the matches. The Spotlight window looks like something from the Windows world: it works like a web browser, you can't easily navigate it with the keyboard, you have to keep pressing the "i" buttons just to learn where a file is, and so on. The Finder window requires that you jump through all sorts of hoops just to find a file by name. Worst of all, none of these front ends give you access to the real power of Spotlight: they automatically do wildcard searches, they don't let you do exact searches, they don't let you specify case-sensitivity or word-based searches, and they don't let you construct complex boolean searches with AND, OR, and NOT (or if they do, it isn't clear how).
So I wrote this substitute, in order to access the real Spotlight. You can do any kind of Spotlight search; seven search keys are built in, and you can add more, and you can even view and edit a search as text if you like. You can use wildcards or not, specify word-based, case-insensitive, and diacritic-insensitive searches, and construct complex searches with AND, OR, and NOT. A Date Assistant translates dates into Spotlights query langugae for you. Results are a simple list of filename and paths. Download it here: http://pages.sbcglobal.net/mattneub/down...tLight.zip
Matt's homepage with lots of other goodies: http://www.tidbits.com/matt/default2.html
NotLight
A simple Spotlight front-end substitute. I wrote this because I got sick and tired of Tiger's lousy Spotlight interface. The magnifying-glass menu is a fake menu; it behaves oddly, and doesn't show all the matches. The Spotlight window looks like something from the Windows world: it works like a web browser, you can't easily navigate it with the keyboard, you have to keep pressing the "i" buttons just to learn where a file is, and so on. The Finder window requires that you jump through all sorts of hoops just to find a file by name. Worst of all, none of these front ends give you access to the real power of Spotlight: they automatically do wildcard searches, they don't let you do exact searches, they don't let you specify case-sensitivity or word-based searches, and they don't let you construct complex boolean searches with AND, OR, and NOT (or if they do, it isn't clear how).
So I wrote this substitute, in order to access the real Spotlight. You can do any kind of Spotlight search; seven search keys are built in, and you can add more, and you can even view and edit a search as text if you like. You can use wildcards or not, specify word-based, case-insensitive, and diacritic-insensitive searches, and construct complex searches with AND, OR, and NOT. A Date Assistant translates dates into Spotlights query langugae for you. Results are a simple list of filename and paths. Download it here: http://pages.sbcglobal.net/mattneub/down...tLight.zip
Matt's homepage with lots of other goodies: http://www.tidbits.com/matt/default2.html
