Tagged Questions

3
votes
2answers
167 views

How can I do a full text search of plaintext files in my DropBox folder?

I understand that Spotlight will search the full text of files in any folder and will show files that contain instances of the searched text. But I would also like to see highlighted instances of the ...
0
votes
1answer
534 views

Spotlight doesn't work anymore in OS X Mountain Lion

I can't get Spotlight to search for any documents. When I search the Finder for documents, nothing happens and the Spotlight search through the menu bar only shows up web searches.
3
votes
2answers
92 views

Non-recursive spotlight search?

When using the Spotlight search at the top right of a finder window, I often want the search to be non-recursive, i.e. only look at files in that specific directory, not any directories within it. Is ...
1
vote
2answers
89 views

Does the search in Finder need spotlight?

I just reinstalled OS X Lion and turned off the spotlight immediately. I noticed that search in Finder stopped working. Is this because of disabling spotlight? Is there a way to get this back without ...
1
vote
1answer
282 views

Rules for Spotlight search (on osx 10.8)

I absolutely do not understand the rules that Spotlight (osx 10.8) uses to search my files. If I enter the query sbml and select filename from the dropdown menu, these are the results that come up: ...
0
votes
1answer
315 views

How to make Spotlight index PDF documents to search faster or on my command?

I need to search some words in many PDF documents. It worked very well when I searched over old documents but my OS X has not indexed yet the new PDFs. How can I search over the new PDFs?
0
votes
0answers
34 views

Search across multiple OS X computers via offline indexing

A feature I would love to see in Spotlight or some other Search/Indexing application would be the ability to search multiple desktops even when they are not currently connected via AFP/Bonjour or ...
2
votes
1answer
256 views

Xcode doesn't show up in spotlight results, neither search results

I haven't noticed exactly when it happened but previously I was always using spotlight to run Xcode. Now if i'm typing "Xcode" in it, only folders containing this name show up, or some xcode projects, ...
2
votes
2answers
212 views

How to locate a file in Spotlight using folder and file name?

I often want to navigate to a file or folder that does not have a unique name. Instead, the parent folder in combination with the file or foldern name makes it unique. Here are a few examples: I ...
3
votes
2answers
265 views

Can “mdfind” search for phrases and not just unordered words?

Is there a way to search for an exact phrase using the mdfind utility? For example, I created two text documents titled "test1" and "test2". The contents of "test1" are: I love Apple And the ...
1
vote
1answer
167 views

OS X 10.5/10.6/10.7, Search, Spotlight

I'm handling a migration from an on old Mac server to a Windows Server 2008 R2 machine running a 12 TB (10 usable) RAID 5 server. It's using an SMB share and now the OS X 10.5/10.6 users can search - ...
2
votes
1answer
221 views

Why do some app spotlight results show the “.app” extension, but not all?

Even though I've explicitly set the Finder preference to display all file extensions, I'm still finding that some apps do not show the file name extension in their Spotlight result. Here are some ...
0
votes
0answers
314 views

Finder Search attribute “Tags”

It looks like the search attribute "Tags" is no longer available in the Mountain Lion Finder. I used this to quickly find Open Meta Taggged files on my Mac by means of a Smart Folder. Is there an ...
1
vote
2answers
373 views

How can I use Regular Expressions in Spotlight on Mountain Lion?

How can I use Regular Expressions in Spotlight on Mountain Lion? I want to use my knowledge of regular expressions to make my search results more exact.
7
votes
5answers
597 views

How can I create a Saved Search that excludes a specific folder from the results?

I'm trying to set up a Saved Search of my Mac that will exclude files in a folder called 'XYZ' from the search results. The reason is because I'm getting a ton of false positives from that folder that ...
0
votes
0answers
98 views

Search across networked drives that are only sometimes connected

I've got networked drives at work and networked drives at home. What's a way to set up search so that it automatically applies searches to each drive when connected without having to rebuild the index ...
0
votes
0answers
217 views

“Search files” in a NAS using AFP and Samba?

I've a Synology NAS with all data from our Mac company division, 1 Terabyte of data. The problem is that the "search" files isn't working. Before, we used Spotlight with success: it works, and it was ...
1
vote
2answers
403 views

In Lion Spotlight search results, how do I find which folder contains a specific file?

I recently upgraded to Lion. I also installed Microsoft Office 2011. In Spotlight, how do I now find in which folder a document is? It used to be that hovering the mouse over the doc would show the ...
1
vote
1answer
555 views

How can I enable search by filename in finder on Lion

Before switching to Lion (on Snow leopard) I used to open a directory (like my Downloads) and start searching using the search box at the top right of the finder window for a file and there was an ...
1
vote
1answer
215 views

Tips for using spotlight with webpages served via https

I've started using spotlight with webpages today. It will actually index the content of web pages in your history and bookmarks. It's great. But I can't find any documentation on how to use it. ...
2
votes
0answers
222 views

How can I integrate custom search app's results to my iPhone's spotlight search? [closed]

Is it possible to extend iOS spotlight's search results to include data from my application? My iOS app has a separate search interface but it would be great if there was a way to provide the results ...
8
votes
5answers
8k views

Searching by file name (as opposed to name and contents) in Lion

In earlier versions of OSX, when you search in a Finder window, it gave you the choice of searching by contents or file name. In Lion this choice seems to have disappeared, I can only search by ...
1
vote
2answers
220 views

Mac not searching my files

Today I started my Mac (iMac) and when I tried to search in finder or spotlight it produce no results. I think its related to the search cache. I guess it gets corrupted. If this is the case How can I ...
0
votes
1answer
434 views

How do I temporarily exclude a folder from a search?

I often use spotlight to locate documents quickly. The one annoying thing is that I often email documents to share them and spotlight will find the version of the document indexed in my mailbox ...
1
vote
1answer
797 views

How to find a telephone number strored in contacts by searching for a substring on iPhone

I'd like to search my iPhone contacts using a part of a telephone number as a key (search by substring). The integrated spotlight search, however, doesn't return any entries when searching for a full ...
0
votes
1answer
154 views

Is there a QuickLook app that will highlight search terms within MS Word documents?

I have a client with a large number of Word documents that he needs to be able to search. He's been using Spotlight and Quick Look, which has worked pretty well. He asked me if there was a way to ...
6
votes
5answers
4k views

How Can I Search A Specific Type of File in Mac?

Is there any way to search a specific type of file using Spotlight? I remember there was a special command or something that I had to put in front of the search phrase but I cannot remember it now. ...