New File Finding App, Cling, Is Not Everything
I recently saw a new Mac file finding app, Cling, announced on Macupdate and
Thriftmac. The description of
the app said that it brings fuzzy search to a utility with a GUI.
Searches with partial or misspelled file names are promised to work. The developer's website states
that the app is designed to be similar in function to the legendary
Windows file finding utility, Everything,
which is indeed, one of the best file finding apps I have ever used.
I've installed it for many users who needed to search network drives
containing thousands of files.
I read the documentation on the website which went into detail about the amount of CPU power consumed and the memory needed to run Cling. Logically, since it does not use the Spotlight indez like some other search tools, it n needed time after starting the first time to create its own index. The website said that it takes about five minutes. I gave it a couple of hours. I ran my first seach using the word Obsidian as my search term. I've written several articles and taken a lot of notes about the app by that name. I wanted to see what Cling would return. To my surprise and dismay, it returned a list of folders with Obsidian in the path name. I tried several other searches and discovered that including a file extension helped it locate files to some extent. The results Windows only shows 30 results by default, which you can adjust up to 100, but there is no way to have it show you all the files it finds that match what you are searching for.
To compare the results, I used Find any File, another Mac file-finding utility that builds its own indez. A search for Obsidian returned 4,734 hits, all of which it displayed for me to sort and search through. I did not have to try different file extensions, nor did my results contain unrelated folders that had Obsidian in the path name. I was much happier with the results.
Other Mac search utilities that worked better for me are: