Alfred vs Findspot

[jane_w]

Hi,

I'm a longtime Alfred user. Recently one of my friends recommended Findspot to me. I downloaded and gave it a spin. My first impression is that Findspot is really fast. I would say Findspot beats Alfred in terms of finding files. Fuzzy and full path searching are really useful.

But Alfred has more features though (calculator, dictionary...). Which one do you guys use?

 

[Weaselboy]

I am a pretty heavy user of Alfred and never heard of Findspot until I just saw your post here. Just from looking over the web site it looks like is is only a file search tool and does not even begin to do all the other things Alfred does. For example, I have about twenty different Alfred "Workflows" I have either downloaded or made myself. I also use the Alfred clipboard manager and Snippets quite a lot. Findspot has none of that.

It looks like Findspot uses its own index for file searching while Alfred just its the existing Spotlight index, so I could see where if file search was your only need maybe Findspot would be faster and a good tool. But I don't see it as even close to an Alfred replacement.

 

[byron321]

I switched to Findspot for a while. The speed of Findspot is unparalleled, even on my old iMac with a slow hard drive.

Also, searching in Findspot feels much more natural to me. In Alfred, if you want to find a file, you need to type 'open abc'. But in Findspot you can simply type 'abc'. To launch an app, they work the same. Just type the app name.

One thing I really like about Findspot is fuzzy searching. If you have used Control-P in Sublime Text before, you should know what I'm talking about. For example, typing 'dropboxcompilerspdf' can find a file named 'Compilers - Principles, Techniques, and Tools.pdf' inside the Dropbox folder. That's not possible in Alfred or Spotlight.

If you're a developer or sysadmin, you may find Findspot more useful because it comes with a command line client. For example, you can use 'fs cd' to quickly change to a different directory.

Alfred offers more functionalities (workflows, itunes...) though. If you need these functions, you better go with Alfred. Since I only use the search part, I would prefer Findspot over Alfred.

If you're not sure, just try both for a period of time. Time will tell.

 

[Weaselboy]

In Alfred, if you want to find a file, you need to type 'open abc'

If you open Alfred then hit the space bar once it will go into file search mode then you can enter your query.

It does sound like Findspot would be better if you only need file/text search.