Re: build 1573 - lightweight Spotlight integration
Posted: Mon Apr 25, 2016 9:23 am
I often need to navigate to a file or folder anywhere on the disk where I know a part of the name. Without NC, I either use "CMD+Space" in Spotlight GUI, or "mdfind -name ..." when in Terminal. Both allow for quick fuzzy searches without need for wildcards or item order. The latter is especially important, e.g. "mdfind -name author1 author2 pdf" will also find documents where author2 comes before author1 in the file name.
In NC (before build 1573), this workflow is cumbersome. First, one has to go up a few folders ("CMD+Up") since the target file/folder is usually not in the current working directory. Then, in "File->Find" ("CMD+F") one has to use wildcards (*) in the search string because one searches for parts of the file name. The worse problem here is that order matters: "*author1*author2*pdf*" won't find items where author2 comes before author 1. Furthermore, NC's search (in this particular workflow) is significantly slower than invoking Spotlight.
Using NC's new spotlight search ("CMD+ALT+F") can potentially improve the workflow a lot. If one could access substrings of the query like #{query2}..., these could be "&&"-concatenated in the JSON file and one could perform the workflow (exactly like in Spotlight) from NC. Maybe this is not for everyone, but for me this would be a powerful feature and if one wants to do these kind of searches in NC, it's now easy to set up. And it's easy to extend, e.g. "kMDItemTextContent" for content search.
Bottom line for me: fuzzy, order-irrelevant search, less keystrokes for the user, much faster than built-in search.
Thanks,
Sasha
In NC (before build 1573), this workflow is cumbersome. First, one has to go up a few folders ("CMD+Up") since the target file/folder is usually not in the current working directory. Then, in "File->Find" ("CMD+F") one has to use wildcards (*) in the search string because one searches for parts of the file name. The worse problem here is that order matters: "*author1*author2*pdf*" won't find items where author2 comes before author 1. Furthermore, NC's search (in this particular workflow) is significantly slower than invoking Spotlight.
Using NC's new spotlight search ("CMD+ALT+F") can potentially improve the workflow a lot. If one could access substrings of the query like #{query2}..., these could be "&&"-concatenated in the JSON file and one could perform the workflow (exactly like in Spotlight) from NC. Maybe this is not for everyone, but for me this would be a powerful feature and if one wants to do these kind of searches in NC, it's now easy to set up. And it's easy to extend, e.g. "kMDItemTextContent" for content search.
Bottom line for me: fuzzy, order-irrelevant search, less keystrokes for the user, much faster than built-in search.
Thanks,
Sasha