Existing users, 
In some ways FoxTrot is an excellent program. It has a few shortcomings, though, that make it less useful for me than should be the case:
1) With Spotlight disabled (as I have, because it causes disk writes-out and accesses up to 90% CPU resources every few seconds), FoxTrot will not function properly (it depends upon the Spotlight importers and Spotlight bein enabled).
2) FoxTrot interferes with ejecting or unmounting mounted volumes. When I attempt to eject or unmount a mounted volume with FoxTrot running, Ieither am unable to do so without waiting for a lengthy period of time, or else I have to go back and click the volume in question a second time.
3) With Spotlight enabled and FoxTrot doing its thing, I have noticed that it will not find as many instances of a given keyword, for example, as do either EasyFind or iPassepartout. (Note that the latter includes a preview window as does FoxTrot).
4) There is currently no help file for FoxTrot.
-Don-
FoxTrot Personal Search
Advanced find-by-content for your personal data.
Version: 2.5.1
Shortcomings....
Feedback Type: Review
Contributed by: PQXYZ33 Wednesday, February 22 2006 @ 12:54 PM PST
Product Platform: MacOSX
Used Product For: Less than a month
Recommend Product: NO
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Comments
Shortcomings.... - PQXYZ33
Hello Jerome,Yes, if I use Foxtrot prefs to disable Spotlight and then let Foxtrot index whatever folders I have chosen to index, Foxtrot does work. Unfortunately, however, the process mdimport then runs and every few seconds accesses some percentage of CPU resources and does a disk write-out as well; if I go away for a few hours and leave my computer running, I will find hundreds of thousands of disk writes-out have occurred in the meantime.
With Spotlight disabled using a third-party program such as Spotless, the mdimport problem is completely eliminated, but so is the functionality of Foxtrot.
If I open a terminal window and edit /etc/hostconfig to set SPOTLIGHT-NO- then the mdimport problem is eliminated AND Foxtrot works as it should--except that I get that annoying error message every time Foxtrot starts telling me that the mdimporters are disabled or broken when that is completely untrue.
Regards,
-Don-
Saturday, March 04 2006 @ 12:38 PM PST
Shortcomings.... - jerome s
You can disable Spotlight indexing, but you should not disable the metadata importers. Some third party utilities do both, which will prevent FoxTrot to index some file types; instead, use the FoxTrot preferences to disable Spotlight indexing.Reply to This
Thursday, March 02 2006 @ 03:22 AM PST