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Rediscovering FoxTrot Pro
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Posted by MadaboutDana
May 3, 2019 at 07:00 AM
As I remarked earlier, HoudahSpot is powerful, but much slower than FoxTrot (especially to view found files), and without the many additional features. FoxTrot (especially Pro) has an extraordinary range of features for zeroing in very precisely on what you want, very very quickly. Quite simply, it’s a professional search engine, as opposed to a general search engine. Capable as HoudahSpot is, it’s not a professional tool.
Another tool I’m currently testing (at Dellu’s suggestion) is PDF Search, which - if the bulk of your files are PDFs - is also remarkably powerful. However, its indices are (much) bigger than FoxTrot Pro’s, and it takes more time to index, too.
Posted by MadaboutDana
May 3, 2019 at 11:31 AM
Dang, PDF Search’s “Export Search Results” option is rather cool. It simply exports the specific pages with search results in them, with hits highlighted. Pages from a particular document are preceded with a tidy little micro-page label telling you which document they’ve come from. The only slightly annoying addition is a cover page summarising the search query while also advertising PDF Search, but it’s a small price to pay for a rather useful feature.
A test export featuring just 3 pages of search results (from two documents, one of 47 pages, the other of 12) ended up as a very tidy little document, potentially very useful to e.g. lawyers or paralegals, or anyone else who regularly has to search through large tracts of material on behalf of someone else.
Posted by Simon
May 3, 2019 at 12:49 PM
I’ve got Houdaspot 4 and am testing Foxtrot Pro. However, Foxtrot pro does not seem good with .eml files. If I search by email address Foxtrot Pro comes up with nothing out of 71K .eml files. Houdaspot on the other hand finds all the emails with that email address in.
Am I missing something?
Posted by Simon
May 3, 2019 at 12:55 PM
Simon wrote:
I’ve got Houdaspot 4 and am testing Foxtrot Pro. However, Foxtrot pro
>does not seem good with .eml files. If I search by email address Foxtrot
>Pro comes up with nothing out of 71K .eml files. Houdaspot on the other
>hand finds all the emails with that email address in.
>
>Am I missing something?
Funnily enough I had asked CTM that question and as soon as I posted here got a response:
> .eml files are not indexed by content by default; you need a Spotlight metadata importer that supports this filetype.
> You can either install EagleFiler, or MailMate, which both include such an importer. Then .eml files should be categorized as “Mail”.
I’m assuming that Foxtrot Pro does not support .eml out of the box by that response?
Posted by Simon
Jun 20, 2019 at 07:23 AM
After discovering Foxtrot Pro on this forum I have now gone fully in and am extremely happy. I’ve ditched Devonthink which I realise I was using for search purposes most anyway. I wasn’t an AI user. Foxtrot has also saved me disk space over Devonthink and it also feels better to have all my files in Finder once again. I’ve also been able to return to Mailmate for my email as I needed to use Apple Mail previously to be able to import mail to Devonthink. Mailmate also allows email to be searched properly by Foxtrot.
I love the fact that I’m actually finding stuff that had previously proved elusive. Search is fast and narrowing down the criteria is easy. Searching by kind is simple and you can even get a line list of the word you’re searching in all your documents.
Thanks to those who highlighted this to me in this forum. It really has been a gem of a find!