Lost some emails during a system change-over. They don't appear in my Mail viewer but I can find some of them using Spotlight by remembering certain words and phrases. But Spotlight doesn't tell me where the files are that it's found. Presumably other files are located there as well. At least if I knew where they were I could open them with a text editor or something.
For some things the free Easyfind is better than Spotlight.
If you want to use Spotlight for this I find if you get the list to display in a "show all" Spotlight window (vs. the menu), then right (control+) click on the item, there's a "reveal in Finder" option.
I agree with the great Limnos, Easyfind...
I'd get EasyFind...
http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/11076
Or Find Any File...
http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/30079/find-any-file
I have Spotlight completely disabled on most of my Macs, only keep it runnibg on a couple to help out here with all it's problems. 😟
Easy find is certainly easier than the normal Finder, but it doesn't scan for raw text like Spotlight. The Reveal in Finder feature doesn't seem to work with email messages though it does with other stuff. Thanks anyhow.
Thanks, it's slower but can seach for text using the File Contents button. 🙂
It can search file contents but that has to be done separately from file & folder names so you have to do two searches to get all.
Also Spotlight will search the tags of music files but Easyfind does not.
There are many kinds of files that Apple has decreed are off-limits to the useless and intrusive Spotblight, such as program files and system files. EasyFind finds them.
There's nothing in Spotblight that makes me want to forget its intrusiveness.
Spotblight, Dashboard and Time Machine are permanently disabled in my systems.
If you do not mind burning up your machine & harddrive, this will search for a string in every file.
Macintosh-HD -> Applications -> Utilities -> Terminal
sudo find / -type f -exec grep -il "your-word-here" {} \;
your-word-here the exact string to match. It's case independent, but that's all the variance allowed.
Robert
I'll not disable Spotlight on my computer. I agree, it won't find everything, but it is a lot more convenient using Spotlight for a quick search than firing up EasyFind (unless you're the kind of person to keep batches of utilities open 24/7). I mostly use it for searching for music titles and (to be honest) text help files I have built for assisting people on Apple Discussions/Communities. I can do a quick search with a single mouse click for something like "Spotlight" and it will show all the text files I have on various Spotlight subjects, both in the title and in the text, at the same time.
I also use and value Easyfind, but Spotlight finds what I need 19 times out of 20.
Limnos wrote:
I'll not disable Spotlight on my computer. I agree, it won't find everything, but it is a lot more convenient using Spotlight for a quick search than firing up EasyFind (unless you're the kind of person to keep batches of utilities open 24/7)…
1.—I do not feel that questionable advantage justifies my putting up with the intrusiveness of Spotblight; and
2.— Yes, EasyFind is always open on my system. I feel I can afford that with my 16 GB of RAM. 😀
2.5 GHz Power Mac (PPC) G5-Quad; 16GB RAM; mutant, flashed 550MHz nVidia GeForce 7800GTX, 1,700MHz 512MB VRAM; ATTO ExpressPCI UL5D LP SCSI card; Mac OS X Tiger 10.4.11 and Leopard 10.5.8 boot drives; Spotblight, Dashboard and Time Machine permanently disabled; dual 22" CRT monitors; USB wireless 'n' available but connected to the Internet via wired Ethernet; FW flatbed scanner; 2 SCSI scanners (one tabloid-size transparency scanner and a film scanner); various internal & external HDs; FW Epson 2200 and Ethernet Samsung ML-2850ND printers; 2 X Back-UPS RS 1500 XS units.
Command-Click on the file in the Spotlight drop-down menu.
To find location of a document in Spotlight, when using Lion OS:
Open the document you want to locate in spotlight.
Position your cursor over the name of the document--at the top center of the page and then
Right click (control click).
It should open a menu that reveals the path to the document.
Sure, but it's quicker to just command-click on the file, if he's going to open it anyway. In particular if he's going to open it in some program other than the default for that particular file type. 😉
It works like a charm in Snow Leopard anyway..
Best regards
thanks for the additional information.
In Snow Leopard, hovering the cursor over an item in the dropdown Spotlight would display a tooltip-style path. But this doesn't happen in Lion, or can it be selected to display?
Can spotlight show where files are?
