NotLight - 0.5

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: the only searches you can do are filename and content. But you can use wildcards or not, specify word-based, case-insensitive, and diacritic-insensitive searches, and construct complex searches with AND, OR, and NOT. You're shown the actual search query in Spotlight's native query language. Results are a simple list of filename and paths.