#DEVONTHINK PRO OFFICE SEARCH BOOLEANS MAC OS#
#DEVONTHINK PRO OFFICE SEARCH BOOLEANS PDF#
#DEVONTHINK PRO OFFICE SEARCH BOOLEANS UPDATE#
#DEVONTHINK PRO OFFICE SEARCH BOOLEANS TRIAL#
#DEVONTHINK PRO OFFICE SEARCH BOOLEANS PROFESSIONAL#

#DEVONTHINK PRO OFFICE SEARCH BOOLEANS PDF#

I want a searching tool that digs all the pdf documents in my drive, and pick up that specific term (idea). What I really want is a deep dig into the documents not their metadata. Honestly, I find this app almost useless because it relies on metadata.

#DEVONTHINK PRO OFFICE SEARCH BOOLEANS TRIAL#

I believe you can download a trial – I’d strongly recommend doing so.įor academic (and indeed general or specialised research) purposes, FoxTrot Pro wins hands-down.Īs to satis´ point, I also have tried HoudahSpot some time ago. If you’re searching on multiple terms, FoxTrot will assign a different colour to each of them so you can skip from hit term to hit term and see at a glance which specific term has been highlighted. You can build as many indices as you like you can also apply complex Boolean criteria if you want to, or use FoxTrot’s ingenious “near” switches instead to make things easier. I’ve started moving all my extensive databases of Stuff from document management programs like DEVONthink Pro Office, Keep It, Together, MacJournal, Yojimbo and so on into simple folders and then indexing the latter with FoxTrot Pro. FoxTrot Pro does all the things dtSearch does, at least as well, and includes its own viewers so you can open multiple found files in separate windows using the FoxTrot viewer rather than the originating app (if you want to).

#DEVONTHINK PRO OFFICE SEARCH BOOLEANS UPDATE#

FoxTrot Pro is now at version 7.0, but I confess I’m still using the last update to version 6.0, which is already powerful enough for my needs. This is the closest thing on macOS to the academic’s friend, dtSearch (the best desktop search app on Windows, and indeed on a web server). In fact, I might have been persuaded to buy it if not for…įoxTrot Pro (please note that I use the Pro version, which is extraordinarily powerful), which I’ve been using since version 5.0, and is amazing. I recently tried out the latest version of HoudahSpot, which I thought was really quite good. Didn’t make much of an impression, to be honest. I’ve used DEVONsphere, but not for some time.

#DEVONTHINK PRO OFFICE SEARCH BOOLEANS PROFESSIONAL#

Price in 1990 was around $130, which would be around twice that today.ĭisclaimer: IANAA as such, but I am a professional researcher and regularly edit academic papers on behalf of – usually German – doctoral students through to senior professors. It also would only index a beginning portion of long documents, which made it useless for me. If I remember right you could see a stamp-sized text window in results and you needed to open the documents themselves then search within them to find your search term. The background indexing took a long time, and consumed up to 5% of the drive’s space. It had its niche because search was terrible on old Macs, but the app had to build it own indices for each volume searched - floppy, HD, CD-ROM.

#DEVONTHINK PRO OFFICE SEARCH BOOLEANS MAC OS#

HoudahSpot leverages the built in Spotlight index, not sure if FoxTrot does the same or builds its own.īack in the late 80s, the creator of Lotus 1-2-3, Mitch Kapor, started a company called On Technology, and its first Mac product was a Desk Accessory (a mini app that ran in the old cooperative-multitasking Mac OS of the time) called On Location that was a personal Mac search engine. Never used FoxTrot but it has a very good reputation, although I think you’d need to spend $120 on the FoxTrot Professional version to match HoudahSpot’s search capabilities. I’ve used HoudahSpot since 2008, and according to my records the app’s total cost including two upgrades was about $45. You can even craft a Keyboard Maestro macro to take a HoudahSpot PDF result and open the document in a PDF viewer like Skim and take you to the result, which you can see here. I have however completely replaced Spotlight with HoudahSpot for everyday searches of all kinds, including pdfs, and even changed the default Command-Spacebar to invoke HoudahSpot instead of Spotlight. (One of the reasons I don’t use DevonThink anymore.) I own DevonSphere and it does a serviceable job but I rarely need to exclusively search PDFs and I don’t find it that pleasurable to use. Which one do you find the most effective, and why? So far, in the Mac hemisphere, the above 4 apps seem the leaders.

It is very important to have a powerful searching tool to find that specific concept or idea, or term. We have packs of pdf files lying around (organized in Be or other). PDF-search vs Devonthink vs Foxtrot vs Devonsphere

Devonthink pro office search booleans