NotLight - 1.4

NotLight is a simple Spotlight front-end substitute. I wrote this because I got sick and tired of Tiger's lousy Spotlight interface.

(How lousy is it? The magnifying-glass menu is a fake menu; it behaves oddly, and doesn't show all the matches. The Spotlight window looks like something from the Windows world: it works like a web browser, you can't easily navigate it with the keyboard, you have to keep pressing the "i" buttons just to learn where a file is, and so on. The Finder window requires that you jump through all sorts of hoops just to find a file by name. Worst of all, none of these front ends give you access to the real power of Spotlight: they automatically do wildcard searches, they don't let you do exact searches, they don't let you specify case-sensitivity or word-based searches, and they don't let you construct complex boolean searches with AND, OR, and NOT - or if they do, it isn't clear how.)

So I wrote this substitute, in order to access the real Spotlight. This front end is very simple; but it gives you full access to, and control over, the true power of a Spotlight search. You can use wildcards or not, specify word-based, case-insensitive, and diacritic-insensitive searches, and construct complex searches with AND, OR, and NOT. The Date Assistant lets you form date searches using Spotlight's date specifier syntax. By default, only seven search keys are included (to keep things simple); but you can add any others that you frequently use. You're shown (and can edit) the actual search query in Spotlight's native query language. Seach queries can be saved as simple XML. Results are displayed a simple list of filenames and paths.