Even find yourself frustrated with Spotlight and Finder search? HoudahSpot might be the answer.
Spotlight is a great tool for finding files on your Mac. It’s (generally) fast and uncomplicated. If you have some documents in your Documents folder and a bunch (ma)lingering on your desktop, Spotlight is probably the best way to find something. HoudahSpot, however, lets you drill deeper, specify (and restrict) search locations, and apply just about any criteria you can think of.
Spotlight offers a number of search modifiers that aren’t immediately obvious to the casual user.
- Filter by file type: You can type a forward slash followed by a file type, such as /PDF or /Images, to show only those specific document formats in your search results.
- Search by app or location: Enter an app name like Mail or Notes, or a location like iCloud Drive, and press the Tab key to search exclusively within that app or folder.
- Apply keywords and operators: Add kind:, author:, or title: before your search term, or use uppercase AND, OR, and NOT for precise results.
Learning these power moves notably improves your Spotlight experience. And of course, you can always move to Finder to finely tune your searches.
But if you’re doing that a lot, you might prefer HoudahSpot.
Search Templates
HoudahSpot offers a couple of different ways to repeat searches: templates and saved searches. They aren’t quite the same thing, but they’re close enough to each other that I had to think about the difference between the two while learning the app.
Search templates allow you to create a custom search that you can save and reuse. They appear in HoudahSpot’s sidebar, as well as in the search bar. You can use the template as your starting point and refine your search as needed without editing the template. Templates open a new, disposable search window. You can also create keyboard shortcuts to invoke templates. Once you have an open search window with a template applied, you can further refine your search.
HoudahSpot’s templates are saved in your user library, and so they don’t sync between machines. There are ways around this, though, as I’ll explain later.
Saved Searches
Unliked HoudahSpot’s templates, saved searches are documents that you can save anywhere on your Mac. As with templates, you can change the search criteria as you need to, and save the result as a new document or overwrite the original.
Spotlight-ish
I do happen to like the simplicity of Spotlight’s interface, most notably the command-space shortcut to open the search bar. HoudahSpot can’t replace that feature exactly, but you can set up a shortcut to open a search bar. HoudahSpot doesn’t start searching immediately, as Spotlight does, but it’s powerful in that you can specify which of your search templates to use, and restrict your search to file names or text contents.
Extensions and Integrations
You can integrate HoudahSpot with Finder; doing so creates a menu in any Finder’s menu bar. Invoking HoudahSpot from the Finder opens a new HoudahSpot search window focusing on the current Finder directory that you’re in. You can also select templates to apply to your search.
For example, I have a folder on my Desktop called “Collect”; it’s a dumping ground for files that have lingered too long on my desktop, which Hazel cleans up for me. I can open my Collect folder, invoke HoudahSpot and select a template, such as “Excel Files,” to reveal all of the spreadsheets in that folder.
There’s a HoudahSpot extension for Launchbar, too; you can enter text in Launchbar by pressing the apostrophe key, and then use the Launchbar extension to conduct a search. If you’re an Alfred user, there’s a HoudahSpot extension for that, too.
Lastly, there’s a PopClip extension for HoudahSpot. You select text and then click the HoudahSpot icon in the PopClip menu to search for that text on your Mac.
Examples
Here are some of the example searches and templates I’ve created in HoudahSpot:
- Markdown files: Any markdown file, regardless of its location, using any of the file extensions recognized as a Markdown file
- Outlines: Bike, OPML, OmniOutliner files
- Spreadsheets: any Excel (either extension) or Numbers files
Summing It Up
HoudahSpot isn’t a replacement for the default Spotlight interface, and in fact it’s built upon Spotlight’s deep integration with macOS. But it’s a powerful tool to help you find files that Spotlight won’t always reveal easily, and the customizable search templates are a power user’s dream. If you’ve ever taken a quick breath before hitting command-space to search using Spotlight, HoudahSpot is worth a look.
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