HoudahSpot 5

Search your Mac quickly with this highly configurable tool

$34 From HoudahSpot Software, houdah.com Needs macOS 10.13 or later

If you regularly use the Finder’s Smart Folders to create custom searches, you’ll be only too aware of its limitations. HoudahSpot overcomes those and allows you to easily perform speedy and complex search queries.

Version 5 brings a host of new features, including one that not only previews a document when you search for a passage of text, but highlights the passage, making it much easier to find.

Version 5 also brings the Recent Attributes and Recent Values functions, which remember attributes and values you’ve used in recent searches, and suggest them for your next search. You can now arrange results by date, size, kind, or application, and search for files by date in a given month or year. Mojave users can add a HoudahSpot Quick Action to the Finder, and there’s now support for Dark Mode and Touch Bar, too.

The core of HoudahSpot is creating complex searches with multiple criteria by adding filters that restrict the search in various ways. Once you’ve created a search, you can turn it into a template so you can use it again. So, for example, you could create a search that returns PDFs with the word “invoice” in their name that have been created in the last 30 days. Or search for emails sent in the last 90 days that have “quotation” in their subject line.

HoudahSpot comes with a number of custom templates you can use as they are, or modify to create your own templates. And you can drag a file onto its window to use its attributes as the basis of a search.

Once you’ve found the file you’re looking for, you can use the macOS share extension to share it, preview it with Quick Look, reveal it in the Finder, open it, or rename it. You can also export a list of search results as a CSV file, so you can open it in Excel or Numbers. So, for example, you could use HoudahSpot to generate a list of all the files on your Mac with the word “invoice” in their name created between 6 April 2018 and 5 April 2019, and export it. Other uses for HoudahSpot include inspecting the attributes of a file or folder by dragging it onto HoudahSpot.

THE BOTTOM LINE. HoudahSpot is a boon for anyone who finds Spotlight too slow, and the new features add to its utility.

There are several built–in templates, including this one for Apple Mail, that pre–set search criteria.

Once you’ve located a file, you can preview it using Quick Look, or interrogate its metadata.