Having trouble finding a word in multiple files

[Liam Proven]

On Mon, 15 Jun 2020 at 16:58, rikona <rikona at sonic.net> wrote:

>
> What comparable tools are on the Mac? I have an interest in top-notch
> search tools.

Spotlight. It's a built-in part of the OS and it has been since OS X
"Tiger" about 15 years ago.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spotlight_(software)

Because Apple control the entire OS, filesystem, UI etc. and regularly
change it, they can make breaking changes if they wish. In 10.4, they
added hooks to the filesystem handling code in the kernel that
notified an OS daemon whenever a file was created or its contents
changed. This triggers another daemon and tells it to read the and
index them for searching. This daemon understands a whole pile of 3rd
party formats.

This was the inspiration behind all the other system-wide
indexing-and-search tools, including the various ones Windows has had
since Vista, Google Desktop, and Catfish and Recoll on Linux.

The Windows one isn't very effective since the background scanning
process slows the system, and MS could not simply change the FS code
because tons of 3rd party scanning tools, notably all anti-virus
scanners, already scan file contents. So MS added another one.

The Linux ones aren't very effective since there are so many
filesystems (ext2, ext3, ext4, ReiserFS, Btrfs, XFS, JFS, XFS,
bachesfs, Stratis, blah blah) so many tools, and the deep Unix
dependence on plain-text files. *nix is based around plain-text files
and that's what coders use. There is a bias against 3rd party tools
with proprietary formats, and none are "native", whereas Mac OS X
comes with tools that read & write RTF, Word .DOC and .DOCX, etc., as
standard, and also uses file extensions as a core OS concept, which is
not true of Linux where it's a GUI-level thing.

None of them are as elegant as BeOS and the indexing and querying
built into BFS. On BeOS, you could make a folder that simply showed
all the files ending in .MP plus a single digit that are over half a
meg and were created between last January at half past 3 on the 3rd
Wednesay and midnight on the Tuesday before last. This would at all
times show matching files and nothing else, as a function of the
filesystem itself.

This meant that writing things like email clients was quite trivial on
BeOS: all you do is apply some metadata to files holding each message,
and you automatically get folders, searching, sorting, read/unread
status, attachments -- your program doesn't have to do any sorting or
searching, it merely asks the OS and the results appear instantly.

I miss BeOS. Haiku is fun but it's not the same.

-- 
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