FoxTrot Professional Search for Mac

I wish I had discovered FTP years ago. This is one of the best apps there is IMHO. If you have not realized it yet, Apple’s Finder is not perfectly reliable. During ten years of legal wrangling with the VA I had so many research papers, submissions, rejections, and rebuttals, not to mention all the research to support my arguments, and not to mention fighting with the Air Force to correct my records, I was very frustrated on more than one occasion. I was using HoudahSPot or other Finder liked (spotlight driven) search tools to find words I knew I had previously used (but could no longer remember which revision of a document I had used that term in). But my spotlight driven searches would too often show no results - even after I rebuilt the Spotlight. FTP changed everything for me. It is obsessively easy to schedule all the databases to be updated once a day as in 3 am or whenever you say. It is also very easy to tell FTP to rebuild or update any particular database that you have been using. One of the best parts, besides finally having reliable search results that I was not getting in Finder, is that when I am looking for something in a text document such as Scrivener, I don't have to open each document to see why the search engine said there was a result there for me, That is how HoudahSpot and other Finder based search tools work, you have to pen each document to find and copy out the phrase you were looking for to support your new submission with your old arguments. FTP provides an actual preview that allows you to search in and copy out of - without having to open each and every document. It also has a feature that I think is somewhat similar to NeoFinder, although NeoFinder never really took off for me. NF is supposed to be this great idea where you can catalog all your disks and volumes and find what you were looking for even if a volume is not currently mounted. That is the same thing that FTP does only it does it far better, especially when it comes to text. I can confidently recommend this program, especially if you depend on doing a a lot of writing, a lot of research, or just wanting an accurate result when searching with Finder.

Actually, the personal version is much cheaper than the professional one. I buy it now, as Spotlight doesn't do the job.

Apple's Spotlight is to FTP what TextEdit is to an advanced word processor. I've been using FTP for several years now: it's search capabilities are unmatched and I've never had a problem with their support; once they responded only after a couple of weeks but to tell me that my problem was solved, that it would be integrated in the forthcoming update and gave me a link to its beta version. For me, FTP is a 'must have'.

Works perfectly, I can search through nearly 1TB of files (almost 200,000 of them) in a matter of seconds. I've never found anything else to compare with it, not DEVONthink or Yojimbo or Evernote or Leap or Yep any other program. It searches through my files perfectly, it ranks the results, it previews the files. It does what I want perfectly.

support is not helpful via "help-Send message to support", but (after years of using this app) I learned that support is available and quick to respond at google groups, so I'm back to give this amazing app 5 stars again. the option is in the help menu under "visit foxtrot discussion group" ....