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How good is Finder/Search/Find in Leopard?

NovemberWhiskey

NovemberWhiskey

macrumors 68040
Original poster
May 18, 2009
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Hey guys, I am about to switch over to a 17 MBP this August, and I was wondering how good Finder is in Leopard.

Msft's find/search feature was absolutely atrocious in XP and Vista--but if you have used Windows 7 you know that their new search function is absolutely brilliant. It works much like Mozilla's Thunderbird finder, where results are almost instantaneous (even before you finish typing the word) and very very accurate.

Can the new finder in Snow Leopard compete with Windows 7?
 
I haven't actually used the Search Function in Win 7, so I can't make a valid comparison. But on my intel CD iMac, it currently found a file with a 4 place name as I typed, while doing a Time Machine back up and a heavy file transfer at the same time.
 
So the Finder program on the Mac is like the Explorer program on Windows. It essentially is the user shell that your session works with.

The feature of the Mac that helps you search for files is Spotlight. If you get a second, here's a quick link that shows you a few of its capabilities:
http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/300.html#spotlight

What I like about OS X is that when you save a file, the file you're saving gets indexed into Spotlight as it's being saved. So in most cases, as soon as the file has been written to disk, Spotlight knows it's there (and what words are in it).

Same thing about the Time Machine (for backups). As you modify a file, OS X takes note, so when it's time to do a backup, it doesn't have to scan the entire file system to figure out which files are due to be backed up.

IMO, as with any system, there are a few oddities about both Spotlight and Time Machine, but overall, they work well.
 
-NovemberWhiskey

The comments on spotlight are absolutely correct. And the indexing the OS performs makes the find nearly instant. However, I find that if I am performing a robust search using "Find" Cmd-F, the constraints aren't nearly as open as a former Databas monkey like myself would prefer.

E.G. not so easy to do a layered citeria search like "Files of type X in last few hours with this OR that". I haven't found a way to do the OR yet.
 
It's amazing. Really easy to find anything your looking for especially compared to the microsoft xp/vista search which seemed to take forever and almost blew up your computer in the process.
 
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