14 DAY TRIAL // FoxTrot
Being an old school Mac user, to me searching for a file is the good old Command-F. I never liked Sherlock and never really saw the need for fancy search software, but FoxTrot has made me think again.
After launching it, it asked me to locate the folder where my information was located. Having past experiences with indexing that took forever and a day, I fed it a relatively small folder. It proceeded to search for files that could be indexed and then indexed them. It took FoxTrot about 5 minutes to go through the 16.5 GB folder, which I must say was not that bad considering I left it in the background and got on with what I was doing before.
After it finished with all the boring details, it presented me with its search window. So I started searching. I first searched for "a" and was pleasantly surprised when the result window filled up in less than a second.
Second thing I noticed then was the information in the left drawer, which had 3 categories: age, location and type. I played around and actually found those 3 criteria to actually be useful in narrowing the search down. Depending on the order you click in the age, location and type boxes, the results are filtered accordingly. The boxes slide up and down to reflect this order and sometimes the animation is slow and choppy but unless you have thousands of search results it should be ok. Also, it took me a while to work out how to reset the order, which is accomplished by clicking on the title bar of the boxes. Not exactly the most mac-user intuitive thing to do but I worked it out after a few clicks.
Those things are GREAT. I never really knew I was missing them. Being able to search using lax criteria such as "over 2 months old" and being able to modify select subfolders real time is a very intuitive way to search.
FoxTrot also has a nice preview drawer on the bottom of the search screen in which you can see images, pdf files and text. The "get info" button on the toolbar is a bit redundant since that information is also embedded in the preview drawer.
Inside the main search window, you can also sort the results using the column heads by name, date (which in reality is date modified) and rank. Rank represents how relevant FoxTrot thinks that result is in respect to your original search keywords, and has nothing to do with any of the other filters you might select such as "in the past week", and "word processor".
I searched for words inside text documents and was pleasantly surprised when those words were highlighted in the respective text, if viewed in the preview drawer. On this occasion I noticed that it would not find partial results. However, it will accept * as a wild-card but only after a piece of text, which is good but being able to wild-card both before and after would have been better.
At this point I looked inside the preferences and came to a sudden, abrupt shock. FoxTrot only searched for items inside that folder I gave it in the beginning. Not being able to use it to search anywhere before you index is very unpleasant. Fortunately, you can tell it what to index so if you uncheck everything it goes fast enough if you are in a pinch. In the end it's not so bad because you can have different indexing options for every folder you add. It also has an automated option, which will update the index every day or once every week.
The Good Many heuristic ways to narrow down your search and a well enough laid out interface once you get used to it
The Bad Indexing does take a long time and the preview is not extremely responsive.
The Truth All in all FoxTrot does a pretty good job at helping you find what you need, especially when you don't remember anything specific about that file. Yes, it does take a significant amount of time to index everything but it can be done in the background or while you are away from the computer.
Here are some screenshots of FoxTrot at work, click to enlarge, as always:
