Using Spotlight is similar to using Finder: You cannot search the files in a specific folder, which in some cases is a big inconvenience – when there are a lot of results, it will be quite difficult for you to find the document you are looking for. However, with Spotlight you cannot narrow the search. The purpose of Spotlight is to be a universal search tool, which always searches throughout the whole system. Spotlight is a built-in desktop search tool for Mac that searches not only in your files, but also in the history of the visited websites and other sources.

Shawn Zhang - Software Engineer from Beijing, China Download for free The results are not ranked by relevance.

You cannot search for word combinations.

You cannot see the sentences containing the search terms.

You cannot see the text of the found documents without opening them.

You can view a thumbnail of each document found.

No need to install additional software.

To find the sentences in which the searched word is found, you will need to open all the files one by one and search separately in each of them.

Click on the file name in the search result to see a thumbnail of the document.Ī major drawback of the search with Finder is that it is difficult to navigate in the text of the documents found.

Type your search word in the search box.

In the toolbar below the search box, you have two search options: 'This Mac' or the current folder.

Open Finder and navigate to the folder you want to search.

With the help of Finder you can easily search for text in the contents of the files in a given folder. In this article we will try to give you a quick overview of the best tools for textual search in your documents on Mac.

It turns out that when you have a large number of documents in the search results, it becomes very difficult to find out exactly where the searched text is, and sometimes you have to open the files one by one. Indeed, searching through these tools is quick and easy, but there are also some significant problems – for example, you cannot search for word combinations, you do not see the text of the found sentences, and so on. When you need to search any text in the documents on your Mac, most often you do it with the help of Finder or Spotlight tools.

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