Simple and fast glossary solution for use in all Mac apps
Thread poster: Hans Lenting
Hans Lenting
Hans Lenting
Netherlands
Member (2006)
German to Dutch
Nov 24, 2017

I just discovered this relatively new Keyboard Maestro action:

Prompt With List from File
https://wiki.keyboardmaestro.com/action/Prompt_With_List

With one action you can create a macro that will allow you to quickly search in any text file:

Screen Shot 2017-11-24 at 08.06.42

I've tested it with a tab-delimited glossary containing 1 million lines:

Screen Shot 2017-11-24 at 08.07.52

The results are presented after 2 seconds, which is not bad for 1 million lines. After pressing the Enter key, the selected line will be placed on the clipboard.

MS-Word and MS-Excel files should be supported too.


 
Tom in London
Tom in London
United Kingdom
Local time: 15:08
Member (2008)
Italian to English
Unnecessary Nov 25, 2017

Spotlight already searches for particular words within all files, of all types.

 
Tom in London
Tom in London
United Kingdom
Local time: 15:08
Member (2008)
Italian to English
deleted Nov 25, 2017

deleted

[Edited at 2017-11-25 10:03 GMT]


 
Hans Lenting
Hans Lenting
Netherlands
Member (2006)
German to Dutch
TOPIC STARTER
Spotlight Nov 25, 2017

Tom in London wrote:

Spotlight already searches for particular words within all files, of all types.


It does, but the beauty (at least as far as I'm concerned) of this action is that results of the search are directly available on the clipboard for pasting.

Is this possible in Spotlight too, Tom?


 
Meta Arkadia
Meta Arkadia
Local time: 22:08
English to Indonesian
+ ...
Dictionary.app Nov 26, 2017

Tom in London wrote: Spotlight already searches for particular words within all files, of all types.


It doesn't search all types of (text) files, but it comes close. And it's blistering fast. It's a worry that the macro above takes seconds to come up with the results of one file only while it also uses Spotlight as the search engine. There must be something wrong. It seems the macro can be adjusted to search more than one file - like all files in a specific directory - but I wonder how long a search will take in that case.

DocFetcher (free, cross-platform) seems to be a better candidate for this. You can add unknown file extensions, search results will be highlighted, and it creates it's own search index.

If the files aren't too big, BBEdit/TextWrangler (with a free/gratis version) is a good idea. It can search files and folders, and is reasonably fast.

For a single large file, I use the indexed database of my CAT tool.



You can, of course, create your own indexed database (free/gratis) in most cases).

My favourite solution is to add files to the Apple Dictionary app (free/gratis, comes with macOS).



If it's running, the search results will show up in the app. If it isn't, you'll see a pop-up screen (above). As you can see, you'll get results from all active files.

Cheers,

Hans


 
VIP9N
VIP9N
Local time: 18:08
Russian to English
+ ...
Archivarius 3000 Nov 26, 2017

When I started using Mac again (a couple of years ago) after a long pause (I used Mac in 1997-98 for the first time), I found out that I desperately needed an equivalent of searching application, which I had used in the Windows world.

Firstly, I tried the DocFetcher. It was a total fail, as it crashed upon indexing of about 10 thousand files. However, I have a corpus of about 160 thousand files that I need to search in.

Secondly, I tried FoxTrot Pro. It was much bet
... See more
When I started using Mac again (a couple of years ago) after a long pause (I used Mac in 1997-98 for the first time), I found out that I desperately needed an equivalent of searching application, which I had used in the Windows world.

Firstly, I tried the DocFetcher. It was a total fail, as it crashed upon indexing of about 10 thousand files. However, I have a corpus of about 160 thousand files that I need to search in.

Secondly, I tried FoxTrot Pro. It was much better than the DocFetcher, but not good enough comparing it to the application that I had gotten used to under Windows. For example, it could hang up easily without apparent reason.

I solved the problem by installing Parallels and Windows 7 64 Ultimate in it. There I put my corpus of files, installed Archivarius 3000 and created index. The index size for the entire corpus is about 3.3 Gb. A search takes fractions of a second (my Mac is mid-2011 mini server with 16Gb of RAM and 2 SSDs). On the left pane you see the list of found files, and on the right pane you see the content of the file from the left pane on which you are currently on. Using quotes, you can search for set expressions, not only single words. All is simple, lightning fast and without any hang ups.

I don't know whether it is permitted to show links here, but for those who are interested in, here you are http://www.likasoft.com/document-search/

Good luck
Collapse


 
Meta Arkadia
Meta Arkadia
Local time: 22:08
English to Indonesian
+ ...
SpotInside Nov 26, 2017

VIP9N wrote: However, I have a corpus of about 160 thousand files that I need to search in.


I do hope they are not translation related...

Spotlight can search a huge number of files, but it stops after it found the hits. Somebody should find a way to save the resulting files in a virtual folder (which is the easy part), and then search those files again, highlighting all the hits. In fact, somebody must have done something similar with SpotInside. You probably missed it. You can still download it, but it stopped working after Yosemite (I think).

Cheers,

Hans


 


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Simple and fast glossary solution for use in all Mac apps






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