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 IN PDF 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