Having trouble finding a word in multiple files

[rikona]

On Mon, 15 Jun 2020 17:26:49 +0200
Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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.

Thanks. Sounds pretty general purpose. For on-box text, does it have
things like proximity searching? [word A within 5 words of word B]

> 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.

Or perhaps inspired by the ancient PCoutline? Pretty good at the
time. :-)

> 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.

I used DTsearch for a long time - even worked with the developer when
it was just shareware. It was very good, but became very expensive.

> 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.
>