Alfred + lolcate: a first attempt at a Spotlight replacement for Macs that supports network volumes

The only utility I miss after switching back to a Mac from Windows is Everything (search) by voidtools. It is a blazingly-fast file and folder indexer that provides a better-than-Spotlight solution to searching for files in Windows. With a keyboard shortcut, I can search through millions of files and folders across dozens of terabytes on network volumes. My folders are well named, so most of my searches are for folders rather than files. Results are instantaneous.

Meanwhile, on the Mac, Spotlight is a mess. It doesn’t play well with network volumes and has been a total failure in my workflow. QNAP’s “QSirch” is supposed to enable Spotlight searching over SMB and AFP shares, but in practice, it doesn’t work and is an absolute resource hog. I filed a bug with QNAP after searching for one word returned files with totally different names (QNAP just wrote to say that firmware h4.5.4.1951 build 20220218, which might fix the problem). Also, Spotlight requires that a single network volume is specified as a search destination, and the results always take a long time to return.

David Carpenter from voidtools wrote a reply to my request for a Mac version (he must get this a lot): “A Mac version of Everything is on my TODO list.” Indeed. 🙂

After poking around, I found lolcate, an open-source “comically fast” indexer. Tonight, I wrote a custom Alfred workflow that calls lolcate and displays all of the results. Separate keywords search files, directories, images, and videos. A Python script calls lolcate, iterates through its results, and outputs an Alfred filter JSON. I’m using an MD5 hash on each result’s full path to generate UIDs for each so Alfred can apply its smarts to each result.