HoudahSpot 6
A versatile front end for Spotlight searches
If Spotlight indexes it, HoudahSpot can search for it
£31 (upgrade £18) FROM Houdah Software, houdah.com/houdahSpot
NEEDS macOS 10.14 or later
Searching your Mac often fails or frustrates despite Spotlight’s comprehensive index. This worsened noticeably in macOS 10.15 (Catalina), when Mail messages suddenly became inscrutable with the introduction of ‘Core Spotlight’. While protecting message privacy, this forces you to rely on Mail’s underpowered Mailbox Search feature.
HoudahSpot removes these stumbling blocks with constant access to completely customisable search, which doesn’t have to be set up afresh every time in some generic Finder window. So long as Spotlight indexing is enabled on a volume or folder, it will search using any combination of hundreds of different criteria from Album name through Languages to Year Recorded: if Spotlight indexes it, HoudahSpot can search for it.
Searches can include and exclude multiple locations; their criteria can be exclusive as well as inclusive, such as files which don’t have the .txt extension, and groups of criteria can be combined into logical expressions such as ‘all of the following are true’. When you’ve come up with criteria you want to reuse, save them for later as named snippets. Custom search windows can be saved as the default for the app, or as templates which you can load for common types of search, such as finding misplaced music or long lost files, two of those supplied as standard.
If you have more than a few hundred messages in your mailboxes, HoudahSpot is essential. This new version can install a Mail plug-in which at last extends the full power of its search to the contents of your mailboxes, and even works in Big Sur.
Possibilities and previews
Searches are easy to refine progressively until you reach a manageable number of hits. Set the search limit to 10,000 results and start with a broad term to capture all possibilities. Hone in using additional text content, file extensions or date range; if you’re a power user, these can include regular expressions. HoudahSpot can also reveal the exact query it passes to Spotlight, so you can learn how to tune queries yourself.
You can preview individual search results using QuickLook. As usual with Spotlight, searches are blazingly quick, and made faster by limiting the number of hits. HoudahSpot 6 now runs native on Apple silicon Macs, where it performs even better.
Spotlight doesn’t index items in thirdparty cloud storage, but normally does include iCloud. It also doesn’t index data such as Notes which are stored in a database rather than normal files; for those, you still have to search in that app. HoudahSpot comes with a Finder extension and Quick Actions, is accessible as a Service and from the menu bar, and integrates with Alfred, LaunchBar, PopClip and Default Folder X.