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.

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