I love Spotlight on Mac but wanted to explore a few other tools. Here are a few of my favorites.

DocFetcher

I really like DocFetcher. It's a Java program that runs on all Operating Systems and you can even put it on a USB with an index that leads to other files on the USB. DocFetcher can index all sorts of files including PDF, Microsoft Office, ID3 tags within an MP3. I found it easier to work with then beets.

DocFetcher

Download DocFetcher for free. Desktop search application. DocFetcher is an Open Source desktop search application: It allows you to search the contents of files on your computer. — You can think of it as Google for your local files.

SourceForge

mdfind

mdfind is the Terminal equivalent of Spotlight. It's very powerful and most important of all, scriptable. Below are a few common commands.

mdfind -name rails

mdfind "rails" -onlyin ~/Documents/

mdfind "kind:image date:yesterday"

mdfind 'kMDItemFSCreationDate < $time.today(0) && kMDItemFSCreationDate > $time.today(-1) && kMDItemKind = *image'

ACK

ack is a search tool designed for code. It's built to be a customizable replacement for grep with higher speed,  automatic recursion, and is able to skip unimportant files.

brew install ack

ack rails

ack --js vue

Find

find . -type f -exec grep -l rails {} +

find <~/Documents> -iname "*.<filetype>"

 find #{dir} -type f -name "*.#{type}" 2>/dev/null

Grep

Grep is not my favorite replacement to Spotlight but it has its use cases. Warning: This may take a very long time.

grep -r "rails"

grep -r -l "rails" ~/Documents/

Resources

• mdfile
• ack
• ack cheat sheet