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Important notes for version 8.x
- FoxTrot 8.x is a paid upgrade for users of version 7 and earlier (free upgrade if you purchased FoxTrot after April 1st, 2023). To download the demo of FoxTrot version 8.x without replacing your current version, please visit foxtrot-search.com.
- Minimum requirements for version 8.0.3 and later: macOS 11 Big Sur or later.
Search improvements
- Some found occurrences could not be highlighted in HTML preview.
Indexing improvements
- Link URLs are now indexed (as part of other metadata or, if a hidden preference is set, as part of the content) when using Gumbo for HTML.
- Added a hidden preference to only index contents of files whose path contains one (or one of) regular expression.
- The SkipPathRegex hidden preference can be applied to a single index by adding the name of the index to the pref, e.g. "SkipPathRegex Index Name".
- No longer index some metadata attributes automatically generated by macOS 15.
- Added a garbage filter to avoid indexing huge amounts of non-linguistic textual data.
- Contents of Markdown (.md) files are now indexed.
Other improvements
- On macOS 15 and later, highlighting found occurrences in PDF files is now much faster.
- PowerPoint .pptx files are now categorized as “Presentation” instead of “Document”.
- If a user declines to unquarantine Spotlight Importers or Quick Look Generators (or does not provide admin password), reveal them in the Finder.
Bug fixes
- Fixed a potential crash when a third-party application defines a Universal Type Identifier with an incorrect conformance hierarchy.
- Fixed a small bug when using keyboard navigation in the system menu.
- The index can no longer get corrupted when indexing huge amounts of non-linguistic textual data.
- Checking “Do not show again” in an alert message should now always work as expected.
- Fixed an issue introduced in version 8.0.4b3 when creating a new index, or when rebuilding an index. It is recommended to rebuild these new/rebuilt indices with version 8.0.4b4 or 8.0.4.
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Search improvements
- Fixed some inconsistencies when searching for some special characters, e.g. ℕ.
- In the preview pane, the popup menu that shows the excerpt around each occurrence now also shows the number of occurrences for each searched word.
User interface improvements
- Allow user to change height of location categorizer in column mode.
- Replaced the contextual menu in the Date Histogram Categorizer with a visible popup button.
- Added support for the 3-finger trackpad swipe up/down gesture, in the results list.
Other improvements
- FoxTrot now offers to remove the quarantine flag for recently downloaded Quick Look plug-ins and Spotlight importers.
- FoxTrot's background agents no longer appear under the name “CTM Development SA” in System Settings / General / Login Items / Allow in the Background.
- Updated some third-party libraries.
Bug fixes
- The height of the main window formerly could grow each time FoxTrot was restarted.
- Found folders were displayed with a generic file icon.
- FoxTrot's system menu now works more reliably on macOS 14, when using the up or down arrow keys to select a menu item.
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Important notes for version 8.x
- Minimum requirements for version 8.0: macOS 10.14 Mojave or later.
Bug fixes
- Under some circumstances and for some lists, the last column could sometimes be truncated.
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Bug fixes
- The blacklist window could behave incorrectly when a large number of files are blacklisted.
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FoxTrot version 8 new features are targeted towards the Professional version
However, FoxTrot Personal Search does, “under the hood”, inherit a number of code improvements shared with FoxTrot Professional Search, starting with compatibility with macOS 14 Sonoma:
macOS 14 Sonoma support
- FoxTrot 8 has been fully qualified to run on macOS 14 Sonoma.
User interface improvements
- Added “Did you know” tips window.
Other improvements
- Improved thumbnail generation speed in Thumbnails View mode.
- Added a “Getting Started” guide to the Help menu.
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Important notes for version 7.x and 7.5.x
- New minimum requirements for version 7.5: macOS 10.14 Mojave or later.
- Some new features of FoxTrot 7.5 require that you rebuild your index; if you do, you will need to rebuild it again if you switch back to FoxTrot 7.1.x or older. You can however use your current index without a rebuild to preserve compatibility with version 7.1.x, but then these new features won’t work. “Legacy index format” is shown in the “manage indices” window for indices that do not use the new index format.
Bug fixes
- Fixed a crash that could occur in the background indexer under certain rare circumstances.
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Miscellaneous improvements
- Several minor improvements.
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Miscellaneous improvements
- Updated the predefined locations to use the new DropBox folder.
- Using the PlainTextFileLimitMB hidden preference also applies to .csv and .tsv files; and to HTML files as well when using Gumbo instead of Spotlight’s HTML importer.
Bug fixes
- Some plain text files were not displayed in the preview pane, when using FoxTrot’s built-in extractor instead of Spotlight’s plain text importer.
- The PlainTextFileLimitMB hidden preference could have no effect in version 7.5.2 and 7.5.3.
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Miscellaneous improvements
- Added a built-in extractor to access Thunderbird’s (tested as of version 102.5) Spotlight cache.
- Added predefined locations for indexing Thunderbird’s data if it had been used and configured in settings to make its data available for Spotlight, or to store messages as individual files.
- Improved previewing Mozilla Thunderbird email messages.
- Added a hidden preference (UseFullPathForParentFolder) to index the full path of the parent folder (instead of its name) in the “other metadata” field.
Bug fixes
- Corrected a bug which prevented the indexing of PowerMail caches unless the PowerMail importer had been manually extracted from the application and placed in /Library/Spotlight.
- Fixed a possible crash when launching FoxTrot.
- The FoxTrot system menu could use incorrect colors when toggling dark mode.
- Corrected the the “Force-quit agents, and send report to CTM” functionality, when launching FoxTrot while pressing the command and option keys.
- Removing folders from the “skipping these subfolders” list had no effect; corrected.
- Fixed an inconsistency when using the “UseRelativePathForParentFolder” hidden preference.
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Miscellaneous improvements
- On macOS 13 Ventura, improves how FoxTrot prompts the user to enable FoxTrot Full Disk Access.
- Improved the display of certain document types using legacy third-party Quick Look plugins.
- File types for which no Spotlight metadata importer is installed, but for which an application properly defines a Uniform Type Identifier, are no longer categorized as “other documents”; for example, .mkv files should now be categorized as “Video”.
- Added information about the Uniform Type Identfiers of indexed documents in the crawler log file.
- When re-enbling Spotlight from FoxTrot’s preferences, delete any .metadata_never_index and .metadata_never_index_unless_rootfs flag files on the volume’s root folder.
Bug fixes
- Type-completion suggestions did not work in non-latin languages such as Arabic.
- Fixed some situations where macOS would report that the qlmanage process has crashed while displaying some found document types.
- An exception could be displayed - or an incorrect highlighting of words could occur - upon displaying a PDF document containing invalid Unicode characters.
- Fixed a crash with some third-party touch bar extensions.
- Fixed some issues when buying FoxTrot using a recommendation code.
- Fixed: when multiple colored Finder tags are assigned to a file, a single color badge was displayed in FoxTrot’s result list. (requires rebuilding the index)
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Miscellaneous improvements
- When the “by location” categorizer (categorize by path) was used in “view as columns” mode, there was no tooltip shown upon hovering over a truncated path; and truncated paths were incorrectly displayed, with no “…” indicator.
- File types for which no Spotlight metadata importer is installed, but for which an application properly defines a Uniform Type Identifier, are no longer categorized as “other documents”; for example, .mkv files should now be categorized as “Video”.
- When indexing takes a very long time, a message window is displayed to suggest reading our FAQ; in case the user is not in front of his Mac, the estimated remaining time is now updated in this message window, and it is dismissed when indexing is eventually finished.
Bug fixes
- Fixed a possible crash in the “Recommend FoxTrot” window, when closing the window immediately.
- Fixed a rare crash when displaying PDF documents that contain invalid Unicode characters.
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Indexing improvements
- You can now choose to use an alternative to Spotlight’s importer to process HTML files, email messages and plain text files, from the FoxTot First Aid window (which is shown when FoxTrot is launched while pressing the command and option keys).
- Added a contextual menu item to specify whether to use Xpdf or Spotlight’s metadata importer, to parse specific PDF documents.
- Added a command line to specify whether to use Gumbo or Spotlight’s metadata importer, to parse specific HTML documents.
- When indexing PDF documents, words hyphenated across two lines (or across two pages) are now de-hyphenated.
- Added a hidden preference to index the file’s relative path instead of its parent folder name.
User interface improvements
- Improved the display of email headers (Subject, From, To, Date) on macOS 11 Big Sur and later (as FoxTrot can no longer use Mail.app’s native viewer).
- Added “go to previous / next file” menu items, to allow navigating more easily using the keyboard.
- The “reveal in Finder” contextual menu was empty for files that have been deleted, renamed or moved, instead of showing their original location.
Bug fixes
- Fixed a bug when using the | operator with a quoted string (for example: ["new york" | newyork] did not find any document).
- When toolbar buttons are displayed with text labels, the label could appear disabled when the button is enabled, and vice versa.
- When using the PlainTextPreferredEncodings hidden preference to index plain text files using some legacy character set encodings, these files are now displayed correctly in FoxTrot’s preview.
- Fixed an exception that could occur when using Quick Look.
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Bug fixes
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Improved support for Microsoft Outlook email messages
- Expanded support to additional versions of Microsoft Outlook email message content indexing.
Bug fixes
- Indices created by incompatible versions of FoxTrot now explicitly require a rebuild instead of behaving incorrectly. For this reason, we recommend all users of FoxTrot 7.x update to the most current version.
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Fully compatible with macOS 12 Monterey
Miscellaneous improvements
- Dark mode is now enabled when displaying .rtf files and several other file types.
- .json files are now indexed (and categorized as XML files) even when no third party Spotlight importer handles them.
- Excluded words can now also be specified at the beginning of the search string (e.g.
-lake Michigan ).
- Registered users can change their contact email from the FoxTrot / Enter Registration Code menu.
- Some alert messages with a long text string could be clipped, requiring scrolling the text.
Bug fixes
- Fixed a possible application hang under rare circumstances, i.e. when calling a system command line utility which itself would hang.
- FoxTrot now displays an error message if a search string only contains excluded words (e.g.
-lake ) instead of returning an incorrect result.
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Indexing improvements
- More non-roman languages can now be indexed (Unicode version 13).
- Symbol characters (e.g. #, %, &, @, §, ¶, $, €, ₿, ©, °, ±, ×, ℀, ™, ℘, ↖, ↠, ⇋, ∂, ⌀ etc) and emojis can now be indexed.
- Very large plain text files (larger than 10 MB) can now be indexed entirely. A hidden preference (enabled using Terminal.app) has been added to enable this feature (replace {n} by the maximum size to index, in megabytes):
defaults write com.ctmdev.FoxTrotShared PlainTextFileLimitMB -int {n}
- The default text encoding (a.k.a. character set) to use for plain text files that do not have any encoding hint (neither a Unicode Byte Order Mark, nor a com.apple.TextEncoding extended attribute) can now be set using a hidden preference (enabled using Terminal.app, replace {encodings} by a comma-separated list en encodings to try, e.g. utf-8,windows-1252,macintosh):
defaults write com.ctmdev.FoxTrotShared PlainTextPreferredEncodings ‘{encodings}’
Search improvements
- The location categorizer can now use a multi-column table, instead of a list with disclosable subfolders.
User interface improvements
- The scrollbar of previewed documents now shows a tick mark for each occurrence of a searched word; command-click on a tick mark scrolls to the exact occurrence location; shift-click on the scrollbar scrolls to the next or previous occurrence.
- Font size can now be customized for the left pane (search sources and categorizer) and the result list.
Bug fixes and miscellaneous improvements
- On macOS 11.4, a message could appear to suggest granting FoxTrot "full disk access" even when such access had already been granted.
- Hidden preferences can now be set using the com.ctmdev.foxtrotshared domain, so they apply indifferently to FoxTrot Personal, Professional or Server.
- The “DEVONthink 3 Storage” predefined location has been updated.
- Additional overall stability improvements.
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Fully compatible with macOS 11 Big Sur and M1 Macs
- FoxTrot now runs natively on Apple Silicon Macs.
- Mail.app messages can now be indexed again on macOS 11 Big Sur.
Miscellaneous improvements
- Open source components updated to their latest version.
Bug fixes
- Fixed possible overuse of memory in very specific circumstances.
- Fixed possible hang of the application when displaying some documents containg large hexadecimal data without any line break.
- Fixed an indexing issue when Chinese, Japanese or Korean text is preceded by a digit or some Roman text, with no space or punctuation in between.
- Fixed a temporary hang when clicking the window zoom button, on some macOS versions.
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Recommendation discount
- Please recommend FoxTrot to colleagues and friends - they will get a 15% discount, and you will also accrue credits towards future upgrades.
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Miscellaneous improvements
- Ready for running native operation on Apple Silicon Macs (a native build will be made available when Apple introduces such hardware).
Bug fixes
- Fixed a crash that only occurred on Macs with 22 or more CPU cores.
- Fixed a crash of the extractor process when dealing with some invalid PDF files.
- Fixed a bug when sending an automated report to CTM Development, when FoxTrot has not been granted full disk access in Security & Privacy system preference.
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Miscellaneous improvements
- Pressing the option key in the “search in folder” popup menu now allows removal of selected recently used folders.
- Improved appearance on macOS 11.0 Big Sur.
Bug fixes
- On macOS 10.15 and later, an exception dialog could be displayed when dragging a file from the result list.
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Important notes
- FoxTrot 7 is a paid upgrade for users of version 6 and earlier.
- New minimum requirements for version 7: macOS 10.12 Sierra or later.
Performance improvements
- Much improved indexing time on multicore machines, especially when the index is stored on an SSD. This is however highly dependent on the type and size of the indexed files, and on the hardware configuration.
- Displaying large plain text documents containing no return character is now much faster.
New search features
- The date categorizer has been much improved and is easier to use; added a contextual menu to change the scale of the histogram, and to choose between creation or modification dates.
- Added a “filename extension” categorizer that can be used in addition to “item kind”.
- Added a visible / invisible categorizer.
Other searching or indexing improvements
- Added more options to decide whether to index or not files in packages, applications and frameworks.
User interface improvements
- Dark mode support (macOS 10.14 Mojave and later).
- Modernized some UI elements: tab bar, icons etc.
- Added a “Search…” menu item, with command-L shortcut, to move the keyboard focus to the search field.
- The contextual menu “reveal in finder” now shows the complete path as a submenu.
- The “copy” menu item now copies the path of the selected files.
- Added a “display type” toolbar item to use alternate methods to preview documents (plain text, Quick Look preview…).
Miscellaneous improvements
- Use a modern API for language identification on macOS 10.13 and later.
- Highlighting found occurrences did not work for documents created with recent versions of Pages, Numbers and Keynote.
- Added a hidden preference to use the NaturalLanguage framework for language identification on macOS 10.14 and later (defaults write com.ctmdev.FoxTrot UseNaturalLanguageIdentification -bool YES). This is slower, but may be more accurate.
- Estimation of the remaining indexing time is now more reliable.
- Some files could previously be added to the blacklist, although they had made the extractor crash only once; some third-party extractors can crash randomly, even when processing valid files.
- Indexer log files now contain much less useless information.
- Improved preview of some document types (e.g. Scrivener files).
- A hidden (command-line) preference has been added to remove or speed up the animation of the categorizer pane.
- Some search templates could not work properly from the FoxTrot system menu.
- OpenMeta tags are no longer indexed, as they were replaced by Finder tags years ago. Note that you may need to rebuild your index if some tags appear twice in the tag categorizer.
- The regular expression engine now consider all Unicode letter characters (instead of just ASCII letter characters) when evaluating \w or \b.
Bug fixes
- The indexer could become unresponsive, and could refuse to stop, when compacting a very large index stored on a hard drive.
- The services menu could not work with some applications.
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Bug fixes
- Fixed a crash that only occurred on Macs with 22 or more CPU cores.
- Fixed a bug when sending an automated report to CTM Development, when FoxTrot has not been granted full disk access in Security & Privacy system preference.
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New foxtrot-search.com website
- The help menu now refers to our new website, and to our new discussion forum.
Miscellaneous bug fixes and enhancements
- Fixed an exception that could happen in “copy without line breaks”.
- The in-app store now generates registration codes that can be used with both version 6 and version 7.
- Fixed a crash that could occur on macOS 11.0 Big Sur beta.
- Fixed a crash that could occur when toggling between rich display / plain text display, in the document window, for a PDF document showing its table of contents.
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macOS 10.15 Catalina support
- when indexing the whole boot volume on Catalina, every file (except those in the read-only system volume) were indexed twice.
- fixed a crash on Catalina when displaying a found document using a Quick Look plugin.
- Spotlight metadata importers can be used correctly on Catalina.
- Note that the highlighting of several searched words using different colors in PDF documents, which was partially flawed since macOS 10.12, has finally been fixed by Apple in Catalina.
FoxTrot is now a notarized application, and uses the hardened runtime on macOS 10.14 and later.
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Performance improvement
- Accelerated index updates and rebuilds when, under Manage Indices, certain pre-defined locations were checked using non-default file types.
Compatibility enhancements with recent macOS updates
- Launching FoxTrot or starting an index could be abnormally slow.
- The log file could report worrisome file exceptions when encountering a folder protected by SIP.
- Webarchive files created by Safari could fail to display correctly.
Miscellaneous bug fixes and enhancements
- Some Korean filenames were incorrectly indexed.
- Under certain circumstances, especially when enabling the “Main volume (filenames only)” predefined location, some files could be indexed by filename only instead of by content upon updating the index.
- The indexer log file could report removing from the index a negative number of no longer existant documents.
- In some rare conditions, a few files could be indexed (and thus, could be found) twice.
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Fixed certain FoxTrot launch errors
- Corrected certain conditions under which an indexer could fail to launch with the following errors: “An error occurred when starting the index”, “File permissions error” or “Foxtrot error 999”.
Miscellaneous bug fixes and improvements
- Scheduled updates might have been performed only upon launching the FoxTrot application, instead of when waking up your machine, if your machine was in sleep mode at the designated time.
- Fixed a number user-reportable exception, as well as probable causes of a few occasional crashes.
- Automated bug reports to CTM now contain additional detailed information.
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Important notes
- FoxTrot 6 is a paid upgrade for users of version 5 and earlier.
- New minimum requirements for version 6.6: macOS 10.11 (El Capitan) or later.
macOS 10.14 Mojave support
- macOS 10.14 introduces a number of new privacy-protection features. FoxTrot helps users to configure macOS Mojave so that it will not prevent FoxTrot from indexing non-document data, such as the Mail folder.
- Full compatibility with macOS 10.14 tested.
- Dark mode support will be provided in later versions of FoxTrot.
- Note that file formats handled by third party 32-bit only metadata importers are no longer supported in macOS 10.14.
Increased performance
- Updating an existing index, or creating a filenames-only index, is now quite faster.
Miscellaneous minor bug fixes and improvements
- A crash would occur in FoxTro Personal Search if the shared library “libpcre2.dylib” was installed on your machine.
- Fixed a rare situation where FoxTrot could quit immediately on launch.
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Miscellaneous minor bug fixes and improvements
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Miscellaneous minor bug fixes and improvements
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Important notes
- Version 6.5 introduces an updated index format. Indices created by version 6.0.x, and used without rebuilding with version 6.5 or later, should remain compatible if you revert to version 6.0.4. However if you rebuild your index with version 6.5 or later, you will need to rebuild it again in version 6.0.x if you revert / downgrade to version 6.0.x.
Increased performance
- Some advanced searches are now faster.
- Long searches now display a progress indicator at the bottom of the result list, instead of the indeterminate spinning indicator.
- Long searches can now be aborted, by clicking the progress indicator at the bottom of the result list.
- A new faster compression format (zstandard) is used, both for the index file and for the network traffic of the shared indices and for FoxTrot Server. Note that when rebuilding an index, its size may shrink a bit, due to the fact that zstandard will have learned from the previous version how to optimize compression for this specific index.
Feature enhancements
- FoxTrot Pro only: Added some very precise date, filename, and content filters.
- FoxTrot now replaces curly quotes by straight quotes in the search field, to conform to the FoxTrot Query syntax.
Miscellaneous enhancements and other fixes
- An alert “your registration code is currently used on another computer” could appear when the other Macs use a different registration code.
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Bug fixes
- The Quick Look window could appear when launching FoxTrot.
- We are pleased to announce that Apple will be releasing a fix to the 10.13 PDF highlighting bug in their forthcoming macOS 10.13.4 update.
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Improvements
- Small speed optimization when creating an index.
Bug fixes
- The individual files hidden in the .ftindex file package previously could not exceed 16 GB.
- Fixed a compatibility problem with indices created by the upcoming version 6.5.
- The “resource hogs” window could fail to display any result in certain circumstances.
- The Quick Look window could appear after using FoxTrot’s system menu, if the application was not already launched.
- The search window could fail to open in some specific circumstances.
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High Sierra bug fixes
- On macOS 10.13 High Sierra, the content of the search field could disappear when it did not have the keyboard focus.
- On APFS-formatted volumes only (macOS 10.13 High Sierra), folders containing many documents could be indexed very, very slowly.
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Bug fixes
- Under specific circumstances, FoxTrot could prompt for an “anonymous password” upon launching but then would refuse any typed password. (How rude.)
- A memory leak was unforturnately introduced in version 6.0, which could cause some severe performance issues under certain circumstances.
- Fixed a case where an “error 999” could prevent FoxTrot from launching an index.
- Fixed a case where a file permission problem could prevent FoxTrot from launching or creating an index.
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Note: FoxTrot 6.x is a paid upgrade for users of version 5 and earlier
Increased performance
- Optimized some operations when the index is stored on a rotational HDD.
- Reduce file fragmentation.
- Reduced memory usage when displaying some HTML or PDF files.
- Now built using Apple’s latest Xcode version 8 compilers.
Feature enhancements
- Added option to only index filenames when indexing contents.
- “Copy path” added to the contextual menu (search results, indexed locations, black list).
- Show missing disk space when attempting manual compact and disk is almost full.
- File paths are now clickable with a popup menu to reveal in finder any parent folder.
- Also display in the status bar the number of items found outside of the target folder, when searching only in a specific folder.
- Allow drag-select to toggle multiple checkboxes (manage indices’s file types).
Code modernization
- Implements modern windows (with no window title).
- Modernized some icons and widgets.
- New minimum requirements: macOS 10.9 or later.
- Removed dependency to deprecated QuickTime to preview video and audio files.
Better diagnostics
- Logged file exceptions include filenames.
- More detailed logging when in indexing is very slow.
- When processing a specific file takes longer than usual, the file name is now displayed in the “manage indices” progress.
Synchronization of index files to iPad’s and iPhones running FoxTrot Attaché search
- Added built-in Google Drive support for maintaining up-to-date index archives from FoxTrot Pro or Server to iOS devices running FoxTrot Attaché Search.
Miscellaneous enhancements and other fixes
- Highlighting of [washington -"new york" boston] (no longer highlights occurrences of [new] or [york]).
- Highlighting of a quoted string (or “consecutive words“) with the same word repeated (e.g., “to be, or not to be”) would not work correctly.
- Possible crash fixed on startup in certain circumstances.
- On macOS 10.11 and later, pinch-zooming would not work as expected.
- An “unregistered” dialog could appear when launching FoxTrot, when using regular expressions or exact matches.
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Bug fixes
- Fixed a possible crash or hang when launching the FoxTrot application, especially for users having a lot of files with Finder tags.
- Fixed a case where updating or rebuilding an index would systematically hang.
Stability improvements
- FoxTrot disk images are now signed so as to avoid issues with “Gatekeeper Path Randomization” introduced in macOS 10.12 Sierra.
- Display a warning message when “Gatekeeper Path Randomization” could cause FoxTrot to misbehave.
- Added more detailed information in the log file when an unexpected file error would occur.
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Full compatibility with macOS 10.12 Sierra
Note: we have filed a bug report to Apple regarding a PDF text hilight issue on macOS 10.12 and hope it will be fixed within their next software update
New in-app store
New, more detailed in-application purchase and upgrade feature now using Paddle processing in replacement of Kagi (R.I.P.) The new reseller is now based in the UK and dynamically offers our products without sales tax to Americas, Asia and Africa or with the appropriate VAT rates within the European Union, complete with VAT receipts.
Various minor fixes and enhancements
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Caution: if you are using version 5.5.1 or 5.5.2, please do not use the built-in “Check for updates” software update feature. Instead, replace manually your existing application with a fresh download from our download page. Sorry for the inconvenience.
Miscellaneous improvements
- Binary precompiled header files with a .pch filename extension are no longer indexed as plain text source code files.
- Added a command-line preference to disable indexing files with a given filename extension (optionally only when the file has a specific header).
- Added a command-line preference to override some filename extensions (optionally only when the file has a specific header); this allows indexing files with a known format (or a textual format), but using a non-standard filename extension.
Bug fixes
- Version 5.5.4 of FoxTrot would fail to launch on OS X 10.7 to 10.9.
- FoxTrot Personal Search could fail to launch if Security System Preferences were no set to allow apps downloaded from anywhere.
- The contents of certain Apple Mail messages were improperly indexed on OS X 10.11 El Capitan.
- Software update would fail to install new FoxTrot versions.
- Stability improvements.
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Bug fixes
- Under certain specific circumstances, some menu or toolbar items could stop working (i.e. layout items, Connect to Server in Pro, etc…).
- Fixed an occasional crash / hang on application startup.
- Fixed a case where some documents could be partially indexed (when their content contains some NULL characters).
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Bug fixes
- Fixed problems with the FoxTrot system menu in OS X 10.11 El Capitan.
- The system menu was always automatically re-enabled when opening the system menu preference pane.
- Installing a new version of FoxTrot without uninstalling the previous one could sometimes produce unexpected behaviour.
- The automated report generated from the FoxTrot First Aid dialog now contains more detailed information.
- Fixed a case where all indices could become hidden in version 5.5.
- Under certain rare circumstances, indexing could never terminate when a Spotlight metadata importer had a memory leak.
- Improved searching Chinese, Japanese and Korean text.
- The toolbar, and some menu items, could misbehave on OS X 10.7 to 10.9.
- An error dialog could appear when clicking the Edit menu.
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Enhanced search features
- Search string word completion: when typing words in the search field, partial words are autocompleted. Suggestions are based on the content of your index.
- Typo corrections: when searching for a misspelled word, a similar word is suggested.
- Added “log file”, “XML file” and “file archive” types in the “file types” category.
Enhanced indexing
- By default, the content of log files and generic XML files is no longer indexed. This usually enhances the quality and the performance of the index, as these files contain many non relevant data. This can be toggled when adding a custom folder to the list of indexed locations.
- Added the ability to disable some file types for content indexing, when indexing predefined locations, such as Documents or Downloads.
- Outlook 2015, Dropbox and iCloud Drive support
- Added a “view resource hogs” button in the index configuration window; this can help removing from your index huge files that contain few interesting text but many encoded, garbled or numerical data.
- Email messages stored or exported to the .mbox format with a ‘TEXT’ HFS file type are no longer indexed by contents (this would index a bunch of encoded data).
- Contact’s phone numbers are also indexed unformatted (with no space).
- When a third party Spotlight metadata importer has a memory leak, it is now periodically relaunched to prevent using all the available memory.
Bug fixes
- Some files could be displayed using their “title” metadata attribute instead of the filename; some items (email messages...) could be displayed using their (cryptic) filename instead of the title.
- “Update folder in running indices” was updating all files by content, regardless of the index settings.
- When adding a file to the blacklist, or when disabling some file types in the “index contents of files” list, the previously indexed contents of those files was only removed from the index when rebuilding entirely.
- When displaying found words in some PDF documents, the document could be scrolled horizontally excessively.
- Fixed a case where FoxTrot could fail to update the index, after FoxTrot’s preferences have been erased.
- Fixed a bug in FoxTrot’s system menu on OS X 10.8.
- A “can’t connect” error message could happen in some circumstances, and has been fixed.
- FoxTrot’s system menu could appear twice after rebooting.
- A quick test shown no issue on OS X 10.11 El Capitan.
- FoxTrot could be slow to launch when Finder tags are used intensively.
- The diagnostic tool to send a report to the developer has been improved.
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Bug fixes
- Miscellaneous fixes
- Buying FoxTrot from the application itself was not working on OS X 10.10.3
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Improvements
- Accelerated indexing due to a new implementation of language detection
- We have now added each indices’ name to the associated crawler and indexer process names in Activity Monitor, so as to potentially identify an offending process hanging
Bug fixes
- “Rebuild index” was not working correctly on OS X 10.10 until FoxTrot was manually relaunched
- “Rebuild index” was ignoring files with no indexable content, instead of indexing them by filename only
- Indexing could be very slow in some specific circumstances, such as when Little Snitch was present on OS X 10.10
- Activity Monitor would report our processes in red as being hung (cosmetic issue) when in fact they were working perfectly
- In Wide Screen mode, some dates could be truncated
- Fixed reporting scripts so that they now work again on OS X 10.10
- If the i386MDIHelper process (now known as “FoxTrot Crawler 32-bit helper”) was quit for one reason or other, it was not relaunched
- Addressed a cosmetic crawler report when quitting
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Miscellaneous improvements
- New FoxTrot versions are now installed silently (when enabled in the preferences)
- Registering FoxTrot now applies automatically to any OS X user account on the machine
- Plain text files larger than 10 MB are no longer indexed entirely
Bug fixes
- “Rebuild Index” could fail to actually rebuild the index in version 5.0
- FoxTrot’s system menu did not work correctly on OS X 10.10 Yosemite when using the dark menu bar
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Note: FoxTrot 5 is a paid upgrade for users of version 4 and earlier
Full support for OS X 10.9 Mavericks tags
- Multiple color badges displayed in the result list
- List of tags displayed in the preview header
Updated toolbar and icons to adopt the OS X 10.10 Yosemite user interface
Ability to search in a specific folder
Thumbnail popover in list of found items
System menu, AppleScript and Services menu improvements
- Search in a specific folder
- Added a “Search in FoxTrot” services menu item
Added a “share” toolbar item
New toolbar icon to toggle screen layout
Multiple thumbnail previews when selecting multiple found files
Other improvements
- Finder comments and tags are now indexed for all document types, and not only those for which a spotlight metadata importer exists
- Accelerated performance when previewing the same found file multiple times, i.e. large PDF files
- Added Retina icons
- When using the multi-column result list, some columns can now be removed using the contextual menu
Bug fixes
- Several potential crashes fixed
- Fixed error 999 when permission problems in /Library/Caches or /Library/Caches/TemporaryPublicItems and files inside it
- Highlighting words found using the wildcard character (*) could fail when using proximity search
System requirements
- FoxTrot 5.0 requires a 64-bit Intel Mac running OS X 10.7 or later.
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OS X 10.9 Mavericks support
- Finder tags are indexed and categorized, in addition to OpenMeta tags.
Miscellaneous improvements
- Google Earth .kml files are now indexed.
- A hidden preference has been added to allow indexing a given file type using the metadata importer of another file type.
Bug fixes
- Some text documents containing very long lines with no space character could fail to display in the preview pane.
- Some document types were not indexed when no specific metadata importer was found, although they were a variant of another document type for which a compatible importer existed.
- Indexing .eml files (email messages exported from Microsoft Outlook or other email clients) that contained large attachments using EagleFiler’s Spotlight importer would cause some performance problems (the fix requires FoxTrot 4.6 or later and EagleFiler 1.6.1 or later).
System requirements
- FoxTrot 4.6 requires an Intel Mac running OS X 10.6 or later.
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Updated code base to be synchronized with other FoxTrot products.
System requirements
- FoxTrot 4.5.2 requires an Intel Mac running OS X 10.6 or later.
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iOS support
- Added a presentation of FoxTrot Attaché Search, the iOS companion to FoxTrot Personal and Professional Search.
Bug fixes
- The “Reveal in Finder” button could crash.
System requirements
- FoxTrot 4.5.1 requires an Intel Mac running OS X 10.6 or later.
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iOS support
- Create single text-only index file viewable under iOS with FoxTrot Attaché.
Performance improvements
- Improved the mechanism for updating indices, allowing quicker searches while index is being updated.
- Faster display of text documents (plain text, RTF, Word…).
Miscellaneous improvements
- In right pane preview, added the list of searched terms at the top of the occurrences popup, and enabled toggling of certain terms in order to focus on others.
- When searching for documents that “includes neighboring words”, the preview will now only highlight the words found in the given proximity range.
- Added a “Don’t show again” checkbox in some recurrent error dialogs.
- The “manage third party importers” dialog could show duplicate Spotlight importers.
- “Reveal in Finder” should only use Path Finder if it is already running and its preferences have been set to be the default file browser.
- Outlook messages could be shown with a wrong date.
System requirements
- FoxTrot 4.5 requires an Intel Mac running OS X 10.6 or later.
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Mountain Lion support
- Gatekeeper support (CTM Development is now an identified developer).
- Indexing of Contacts has been fixed (Address Book).
- The default window position could be wrong when relaunching FoxTrot.
- Some files or items were only indexed by name, and not by content, on OS X 10.8.
Miscellaneous improvements
- Better previewing of Safari history items.
- The Library folder (which is no longer visible in the Finder) has been added as a predefined indexable location.
- The progress bar in the Dock is now also displayed during the first indexation.
- Reduced CPU usage during indexing.
Bug fixes
- a crash could occur when toggling the preview mode of a PDF document from plain text to PDF.
System requirements
FoxTrot 4 requires OS X 10.6 or later, and an Intel Mac.
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Modernized result list
The result list has been modernized; it is more configurable, and can be less wide, so more space can be used to preview found documents.
Enhanced PDF support
- 100 % scale now takes into account the screen resolution.
- The “Zoom to Fit” toolbar button has been replaced by “Automatically Resize”, so the PDF document will be resized when resizing the window.
Lion support
Supports OS X 10.7’s full screen mode.
Progress bar in Dock icon
The Dock icon now displays a progress bar when the index is being built or updated.
Performance optimizations
All applications and processes are now 64-bit.
Third party applications
Added predefined indexable locations for Outlook 2011 and Evernote 3.
Miscellaneous improvements
- Most document types can now be zoomed using the pinch gesture.
Bug fixes
- The categorization list would sometimes show only the six most common file types (PDF, Word Processing, HTML and so on), omitting the “More…” option for displaying additional file types.
- fixed continuous disk access when an index file can’t be found, in certain circumstances.
- fixed a crash in certain circumstances, when optimizing the index.
- fixed a crash when the index size is larger than 4 GB.
- fixed a performance issue in certain circumstances.
- Fixed a rare file permission problem which prevented FoxTrot to launch its indexer.
- Some temporary files could be left in the folder /Library/Caches/TemporaryPublicItems.
- It was sometimes impossible to select and copy text from found mail messages.
- A rare hang or crash on startup has been fixed.
- Installing a new version of FoxTrot from the Software Update module could fail, if the application name has been changed in the Finder.
- A rare crash has been fixed when closing a search window.
- The “spotlight” preference pane could display some hidden volumes.
System requirements
FoxTrot 4 requires OS X 10.6 or later, and an Intel Mac.
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French localization
The french localization was missing from version 3.2.
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Improvements
- FoxTrot version 3.2 brings fully-qualified Lion (OS X 10.7) compatibility
- FoxTrot applications are now entirely built as 64-bit apps for enhanced performance
- Optimized code by use of very latest developer tools (Xcode 4, LLVM, clang)
Third-party applications support
- Added support for several third-party applications (such as Evernote) whose documents were formerly indexed but listed with encoded names (note that for already indexed documents, you will need to rebuild your index)
- Added a predefined indexing location for including Evernote documents
FoxTrot Professional upgrade
- Greatly simplified the process of upgrading from FoxTrot Personal to FoxTrot Professional; this can now can be done directly from the application
- FoxTrot Personal now unobtrusively outlines several areas in which FoxTrot Professional can enhance the user’s experience
- FoxTrot now warns you when trying to run FoxTrot Personal and FoxTrot Professional simultaneously
Bug fixes
- Fixed a possible crash when closing a document window before all found words have been highlighted
Note
Due to an upgrading of index formats, once you have used FoxTrot 3.2, you won’t be able to revert to a previous version unless you rebuild your indices.
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Bug fixes
- Fixed a rare case where FoxTrot would ask for a login and password on launch
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Bug fixes
- FoxTrot 3.1 / 3.1.1 could sometimes fail to launch if no previous version had ever been used on the machine or user account
First rapid compatibility validation with Lion Developer Preview; minor known issues:
- Opening the Quick Look window may fail
- A message can appear from time to time when trying to use PowerPC metadata importers, as Lion does not support PowerPC
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Enhanced document preview
- FoxTrot now uses Quick Look’s engine to preview document types not handled internally, enhanced with FoxTrot’s usual occurrences highlighting. This includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Pages, Numbers and Keynote documents, as well as iCal events, Address Book contacts, and Mail messages
- HTML zooming is now a real zoom, not just a font size change
- Better highlighting of found words in multi-frame HTML documents
User interface improvements
- Search results can now be sorted by the name of the containing folder
- Moved index management-related functionality from the File menu to a new Indexing menu
Partial index updating
Added the ability to focus an index update on a given folder’s contents instead of a full update. This applies to all running indices containing the given folder. This can be invoked from the Indexing menu, or by dragging an already-indexed folder to the application icon.
Stopping index updates
Added the ability to stop all indexing; this is useful if you have too much going on at a time when you need the CPU’s full attention for something else. Indexing will stop after processing the current document for each indexer, so if these are large the stop may take a few seconds.
Bug fixes
- Mailtags was always disabled by default, hence if Mailtags was installed, this would preclude all Apple mail messages from being indexed. If you have MailTags installed, you will hence need to rebuild your index once
- Predefined locations could have a generic icon
- FoxTrot can now be used in multiple Mac OS user accounts simultaneously (using fast user switching)
- FoxTrot now displays an appropriate error message when trying to use simultaneously multiple versions of the application in the same Mac OS user account
Enhanced AppleScript support
update all Update all running indices
update folder Update the given file or folder (if its contents is indexed in running indices)
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User interface improvements
- Now remembers the display order of the categories, and which categories were collapsed, from the last search
Software update
FoxTrot now uses the Sparkle engine for software updates.
Bug fixes
- Under certain circumstances, the application could use some CPU resources on idle, when a search result window is visible
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Bug fixes
- The indexer could crash in very specific circumstances
- Printing a text or word processor document from the main window’s preview did not work
- Smaller margins when printing HTML
- Fixed the french localization
- Expiration date removed
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