GoToFile For Mac

With Spotlight's launch in Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger" in April 2005, Apple has revolutionized the way Mac users find documents and folders.

Despite that, there are ways to improve upon its performance, and the GoToFile app has been designed to do just that by making the search process a lot faster.

Upon its launch, you can summon its Spotlight-like interface from GoToFile's status bar item, and you can also set a global keyboard shortcut via the Preferences window for easier and faster launching later on.

GoToFile's search engine uses fuzzy matching, a technique devised to provide with search results matching a partial search term, which means that, unlike when using Spotlight, you can find a document even though you're typing its name while leaving out some of the characters.

With GoToFile, the only thing that matters is the order in which you write the characters in the search term as it will automatically fill out the missing ones.

GoToFile allows you to choose between searching within the filenames or complete system paths, and you can quickly switch between these two modes using the ⌘ + ⇧ + O keyboard shortcut.

To help boost your file pinpoint powers, GoToFile also enables you to use regular expressions, by either helping you find documents by prefix or suffix, as well as effortlessly eliminate some of them out of the search results.

For more details on how to use regular expressions to search for files, you can read the app's description on GoToFile's homepage.

Other worth mentioning features are its Finder integration which allows you to use some of GoToFile's capabilities from the contextual menu and its Quicksilver-esque "act without doing" approach created to help you perform various actions on the currently selected search result without leaving the app's interface.

On the whole, GoToFile is definitely a faster alternative to Apple's Spotlight albeit not always more accurate, but that is not a downside as it has been designed to provide you with a larger array of results from where you can pick the one that better fits your search query.