NotLight 1.4 review

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by rbytes.net on

NotLight is a simple Spotlight front-end substitute.

License: Freeware
OS: Mac OS X
File size: 988K
Developer: mattneub
Price: $0.00
Updated: 03 Aug 2006
0 stars award from rbytes.net


NotLight is a simple Spotlight front-end substitute.
I wrote this because I got sick and tired of Tiger's lousy Spotlight interface. (How lousy is it? 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.
This front end is very simple: the only searches you can do are filename and content. But you can use wildcards or not, specify word-based, case-insensitive, and diacritic-insensitive searches, and construct complex searches with AND, OR, and NOT. You're shown the actual search query in Spotlight's native query language. Results are a simple list of filename and paths.

What's New:
Added ability to view file sizes in the Results listing.
Added support for CocoaTech Path Finder.
Interface tweaks: all checkboxes and operator popup are reset in accordance with search key popup selection; additional attributes reorderably by drag and drop
Massive code cleanup, many small bug fixes.

NotLight 1.4 keywords