• 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.

• When command-clicking in the PDF scrollbar to jump to an occurrence, FoxTrot Professional now updates and scrolls the table of contents or thumbnail view accordingly.
• Sidebar font size now also applies to PDF table of contents and excerpts in the document window.

• Slight speed improvement when using regular expressions.
• Some found occurrences could not be highlighted in HTML preview.

• 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.

• 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.
• FoxTrot Pro now explains to the user why indexes should normally be stored in the Library folder.

• Fixed a potential crash with macOS 15 when using regular expressions on Apple Silicon Macs.
• 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.
• In the Document window, when the PDF page thumbnails are shown, scrolling the PDF document could stop unexpectedly.
• Fixed rare crash when running [then perform advanced filter] [contains the string].
• When using [then filter by Spotlight attributes], the popup menu with the common attributes could be empty.
• [Then filter by Spotlight attribute] [contains the regular expression] could work incorrectly in some situations.
• The index can no longer get corrupted when indexing huge amounts of non-linguistic textual data.
• Improved error handling when the index is stored in iCloud Drive, as this can cause some problems.
• 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.

• 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.

• 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.
• In thumbnail view, using the third mouse button (or 3-finger trackpad swipe up/down) now selects the clicked item, instead of acting on the previously selected items.

• FoxTrot now offers to remove the quarantine flag for recently downloaded Quick Look plug-ins and Spotlight importers.
• When configuring File Sharing integration, FoxTrot now suggests using the SMB URL scheme by default instead of the deprecated AFP scheme.
• 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.

• The height of the main window formerly could grow each time FoxTrot was restarted.
• Found folders were displayed with a generic file icon.
• When executing a bookmark/template with the criteria “all items of type” and “does not include any of the words”, the latter was placed first and was not effective.
• FoxTrot's system menu now works more reliably on macOS 14, when using the up or down arrow keys to select a menu item.

• Minimum requirements for version 8.0: macOS 10.14 Mojave or later.

• Under some circumstances and for some lists, the last column could sometimes be truncated.

• In thumbnails mode, the result list could become unscrollable when systems settings are set to hide scrollbars.
• When switching from the thumbnails view to the compact result list, the width of the list may possibly be incorrect.
• An exception could occur when right-clicking on the preview in the separate document window.
• The blacklist window could behave incorrectly when a large number of files are blacklisted.

Since its 2005 launch, FoxTrot has prioritized precise searching and manageable results.

One approach is to search for whole words by default and suggest moderate use of wildcards.

Another is to offer multiple additive categorizations to focus the user’s attention on a manageable and plausible number of hits.

Our customer-focused work and survey results have highlighted the importance of minimizing duplicate and similar files prior to indexing. To this end, we are introducing a clean-sheet approach to duplicate identification and elimination.

Duplicate apps are a dime a dozen, and some obviously have pretty good features. However, we believe none are as thorough to iteratively sanitize an indexable data universe before using FoxTrot Pro - hence FoxTrot Duplicate Search’s unique features:

• Four methods to identify duplicates
:
  • filename (with or without extension)
  • content
  • duration, for time-based media such as video and audio
  • a list of Spotlight attributes (e.g. for time-based media)
• A dual list showing all potential duplicates on the top and all versions of the selected duplicate on the bottom.
• Direct actions such as Move to Bin, Delete immediately, Open in source application, Quicklook, etc…
• Powerful actions for batch selection by a number of criteria.
• FoxTrot Pro action menu item to search for duplicate files among selected documents.

• FoxTrot 8 has been fully qualified to run on macOS 14 Sonoma.

• PDF OCR: Scanned PDF documents can now undergo Optical Character Recognition on macOS 13 Ventura or later in order to index their textual content.
• Images OCR: Scanned images in formats such as .jpg and .png can now be converted into PDF documents, allowing their textual content to be indexed via Optical Character Recognition on macOS 13 Ventura or later.

• You can now search for some Spotlight attributes that do not have a display name or description, and you can even manually add attributes that have not been declared by any application.
• Added support for “logical size” and “text content length” when filtering by Spotlight attribute.

• Restore last used values when adding or toggling search criteria.
• Added “Open with…” contextual menu item, to open a found file using a specific application.
• Added “Did you know” tips window.

• Improved thumbnail generation speed in Thumbnails View mode.
• Added a “Getting Started” guide to the Help menu.

• 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.

• Fixed a crash that could occur in the background indexer under certain rare circumstances.

• Several minor 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.
• Applying an advanced filter for [other metadata] now also includes the parent folder name.

• 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.

• 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.
• Some icons used in the login dialog have been improved for dark mode.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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)

• 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”.
• Searching did not work correctly when the search sources list was collapsed (i.e. when the “My Computer” disclosure triangle is toggled off).
• Document excerpts are now more relevant, as their length is adjusted according to the layout of the search results list. Hidden preferences have been added to further control their length.
• 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.

• 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.

• Added a new Spotlight attributes filter, to support any textual, numeric, boolean or date Spotlight attribute, in addition to the predefined set of Spotlight attributes that FoxTrot already supports.
• Display the value of the filtered Spotlight attribute, in the excerpts column, when using [then filter by Spotlight attribute].
• Display the list of Spotlight attributes of the selected file in the preview header.
• Spotlight attributes specified as file system extended attributes (as opposed to being part of a file’s content) are now also indexed by FoxTrot.

• 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.

• 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.

• Improved progress information when syncing an index to FoxTrot Attaché.
• Improved upload to FoxTrot Attaché when using a shell script or an AppleScript.
• Upload to FoxTrot Attaché now supports SFTP, if you manually install an SSH key and use the built-in shell script.
• Added a Services menu item to search a specific folder from the Finder’s contextual menu.
• Added a Services menu item to update a specific folder from the Finder’s contextual menu.
• When dragging a folder from the Finder to FoxTrot’s Dock icon, you are now prompted for either searching this folder, or updating it in the index.

• 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.
• Search history could miss recent searches, in case FoxTrot crashed or was forced to quit.
• Improved the drawing of certain file thumbnails.
• 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.

• FoxTrot’s background indexer could crash when enabling index sharing, requiring to relaunch it.

• Expanded support to additional versions of Microsoft Outlook email message content indexing.

• 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.
• A crash or exception could occur upon highlighting searched words in very large PDF files.
• Added support for the most recent version of Google Drive’s folder locations for uploading.
• Since the user-customized list of Finder tags cannot be retrieved on macOS 12, the default tags are displayed instead.

• 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).
• Some alert messages with a long text string could be clipped, requiring scrolling the text.

• Fixed a possible application hang under rare circumstances, i.e. when calling a system command line utility which itself would hang.
• Fixed a possible crash when connecting to a shared index, when multiple macOS user accounts are logged in (fast user switching) and connected to the same shared volume.
• FoxTrot now displays an error message if a search string only contains excluded words (e.g. -lake) instead of returning an incorrect result.

• 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}’

• The location categorizer can now use a multi-column table, instead of a list with disclosable subfolders.

• 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.
• Added a preference to use criteria from the "system menu" search template, instead of the last used criteria, for new searches.

• On macOS 11.4, a message could appear to suggest granting FoxTrot "full disk access" even when such access had already been granted.
• On Apple Silicon Macs, pre-building the thumbnails for every found files (in thumbnails view mode) could hang.
• Using [contains the regular expression] advanced filter to find a possibly empty content or metadata attribute (e.g. ^.{0,100}$ in order to find a string whose length is between 0 and 100 characters) would fail to find empty strings.
• Using an advanced filter to find documents whose content is exactly, or ends with, a given string was not functioning properly.
• 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.

• FoxTrot now runs natively on Apple Silicon Macs.
• Mail.app messages can now be indexed again on macOS 11 Big Sur.

• Added a “Generate All Thumbnails to Preview Cache” menu item, to improve user experience when browsing results in thumbnail mode.
• Open source components updated to their latest version.

• Fixed a crash when searching multiple shared indices.
• 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.

• Please recommend FoxTrot to colleagues and friends - they will get a 15% discount, and you will also accrue credits towards future upgrades.

• Ready for running native operation on Apple Silicon Macs (a native build will be made available when Apple introduces such hardware).

• 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.

• Added a “do not show again” checkbox in the move to folder / move to trash confirmation dialog.
• Deleting files, moving to another folder, or editing Finder tags for a selection of multiple found files is now much faster.
• 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.

• When displaying a file from a shared index (FoxTrot Server or 5-user license), the preview was empty (instead of text-only) in version 7.0 if the shared folder was not mounted or incorrectly configured.
• The highlighting of found words in the preview was not working correctly when using "includes neighboring words" with a single quoted string, or with partial words with an * wildcard.
• On macOS 10.15 and later, an exception dialog could be displayed when dragging a file from the result list.

• 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.

• 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.
• Improved application launch time, when using multiple indices.
• Displaying large plain text documents containing no return character is now much faster.

• Added an “All items of type” criterion to find all indexed files of a given file type (or even all indexed files, regardless of their file type), without searching for any particular text string. This can also be used in conjunction with the filters, to perform advanced filename, date, or regular expression searches.
• 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.

• Added more options to decide whether to index or not files in packages, applications and frameworks.

• Dark mode support (macOS 10.14 Mojave and later).
• Modernized some UI elements: tab bar, icons etc.
• The thumbnail view has been improved: it is faster and more responsive.
• The PDF pages thumbnail view is now much faster to draw.
• Added a preference pane to customize the search history.
• Added a contextual menu in the bookmarks and history window.
• The proximity slider now shows a more precise tooltip.
• When multiple search criterion fields are visible in the search window, empty ones are now always ignored (you previously had to remove unused ones).
• 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…).

• 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.
• More secure network encryption (TLS 1.3) for shared indices.
• 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.

• 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.
• The thumbnail view could sometimes draw a thumbnail from a different file.

• 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.

• The help menu now refers to our new website, and to our new discussion forum.

• 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.
• When using the thumbnails view, some thumbnails could show a different file.
• 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.

• 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.

• Accelerated index updates and rebuilds when, under Manage Indices, certain pre-defined locations were checked using non-default file types.

• 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.

• 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.
• The “FoxTrot Pro Starter” bakground agent could use much more RAM than it should.

• 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”.

• Clicking “Sync now” in the Manages Indices “iOS Sync” pane could previously hang in “waiting” state.
• In some circumstances, iOS syncing would create an empty archive file which would, in turn, cause FoxTrot Attaché to crash.
• FoxTrot Pro no longer prevents iOS sync functionality when the index’s drive is almost full as long as the shared folder (or the Google Drive folder) is on another drive with enough free space.
• The location of the Google Drive folder was sometimes lost, disabling iOS sync silently.

• 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.

• 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 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.

• Updating an existing index, or creating a filenames-only index, is now quite faster.

• An error could occur when executing a search template while using the “thumbnails” list mode.
• Fixed a rare situation where FoxTrot could quit immediately on launch.

• Fixed a case where connecting to a FoxTrot server would ask the user to trust the server’s certificate, even if the certificate is already trusted. This was only occurring on macOS 10.13, when connecting to the server by specifying its hostname, and if the server was not using a CA-issued certificate.
• More detailed error logging if connecting to a FoxTrot Server fails due to a certificate or TLS problem.

• In some specific circumstances, connecting to a FoxTrot Server (or shared FoxTrot Pro index) could fail, and would not show any error message.

• 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.

• 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.

• Added some very precise date, filename, and content filters. Regular expression searches are now performed from the filters only (in addition to the FoxTrot Query syntax).
• When a found document is opened in a separate document window, the search field’s menu now shows additional options for “exact strings” and “regular expressions” searches (e.g., case sensitivity).
• Changed the FoxTrot Query syntax for searching documents not containing a given regular expression (-`expression` instead of !`expression`)
• FoxTrot now replaces curly quotes by straight quotes in the search field, to conform to the FoxTrot Query syntax.

• Better support for IPv6; FoxTrot can now be used to connect to a shared FoxTrot Pro index on a remote machine using Back To My Mac.
• When connecting to a FoxTrot Server (or shared FoxTrot Pro) with multiple indices, concerning files on the same shared folder, and this shared folder is not currently mounted, then only prompt the user once about mounting the shared folder or not.
• Added “reset saved login information” item in the “servers” toolbar menu, to clear any remembered login and password for a connected FoxTrot Server or shared FoxtTrot Pro index.
• Added a contextual menu to the Search Sources list, to remove manually added FoxTrot Servers.

• An alert “your registration code is currently used on another computer” could appear when the other Macs use a different registration code.
• In some cases, when searching multiple indices simultaneously, some excerpts could be missing in the result list, or some excerpts could belong to another document.

• 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.

• Small speed optimization when creating an index.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• Added option to only index filenames when indexing contents.
• Reduced the number of situations where the “manage indices” window is partially empty, when the indexer is busy.
• “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).
• Added a button to rebuild an index, when it is not started.

• Simplified the File Sharing integration to reduce the risk of having access only to document text instead of rich documents from mounted servers.
• Implemented certificate trust management for authenticated connections (now you know what the letters CTM stands for).
• Updated to use a modern OpenSSL version.
• After 5 failed login attempts, FoxTrot delays logging in for 15 s, then 30 s, 60 s, etc.
• Implemented better verification of simultaneous usage on multiple machines.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.
• The index could stop responding when attempting to search for regular expressions on an index not configured to “store document textual contents”.
• An error message is now displayed when attempting to search for exact strings on an index not configured to “store document textual contents”.
• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• Version 5.5.4 of FoxTrot would fail to launch on OS X 10.7 to 10.9.
• 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.

• Under certain specific circumstances, the indices list could be empty, both in the search window and in the “Manage Indices” window.
• 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).
• In version 5.5.1, FoxTrot Professional would fail to connect to a FoxTrot Server running locally on the same machine.

• 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.
• The “plain text / rich text” button was not always working, in the document window.
• Fixed a case where the user could be prompted for a login and/or password to use the local index.
• 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.

• 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 the ability to search for regular expressions.
• Added the ability to search in the file contents only, ignoring the filenames and other metadata.
• Added “log file”, “XML file” and “file archive” types in the “file types” category.
• Added an “all criteria / any criterion (AND / OR)” popup menu when combining multiple criteria.

• Added support for searching and highlighting regular expressions occurrences in all supported document types, including PDF, Word, Pages, Excel etc.
• Added a popup menu in the search field of the document window to toggle between Words, Consecutive Words, Exact String, Regular Expression, or FoxTrot query.

• 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.

• 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.

• Miscellaneous fixes
• Buying FoxTrot from the application itself was not working on OS X 10.10.3

• 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

• “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

• 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

• Modifying Finder tags for multiple documents found in multiple indexes could fail
• When scrolling the result list, some excerpt were not displayed
• FoxTrot’s system menu did not work correctly on OS X 10.10 Yosemite when using the dark menu bar

• Multiple color badges displayed in the result list
• List of tags displayed in the preview header
• You can assign tags to one or multiple selected found files
• When selecting multiple tags in the categorization pane, added a button to toggle between “all selected tags” and “any selected tag”

• Search in a specific folder
• Search using specific template
• Added a preference to run new searches in a new tab (when using the system menu, the history or template window, or AppleScript)
• Added a “Search in FoxTrot” services menu item

• Move to trash
• Move to folder
• Rename
• Reindex

• 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
• Improved UI for iOS sync
• Rebuilding all indices at startup is now performed more efficiently, whenever the number of indices is higher than the number of CPU cores
• Added Retina icons
• When using the multi-column result list, some columns can now be removed using the contextual menu

• Corrected a search template bug where dates were not taken into account
• 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
• When opening a new tab in the search window, the width of the result list was not correct

• FoxTrot 5.0 requires a 64-bit Intel Mac running OS X 10.7 or later.

• FoxTrot indices can now also be synced from FoxTrot Professional or FoxTrot Server, to FoxTrot Attaché on iOS, using web sharing. This requires you to have a web server that you can save to from FoxTrot Professional, and that will make your archived index available to FoxTrot Attaché over HTTP.

• Finder tags are indexed and categorized, in addition to OpenMeta tags.

• 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.

• 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).

• FoxTrot 4.6 requires an Intel Mac running OS X 10.6 or later.

• An index file can now be opened by drag and drop from the Finder to the “manage indices” window.
• An index file can now be copied to FoxTrot Attaché by drag and drop from the “manage indices” window to iTunes’s file sharing pane.

• FoxTrot 4.5.2 requires an Intel Mac running OS X 10.6 or later.

• Added a presentation of FoxTrot Attaché Search, the iOS companion to FoxTrot Personal and Professional Search.

• The “Reveal in Finder” button could crash.

• FoxTrot 4.5.1 requires an Intel Mac running OS X 10.6 or later.

• Create multiple index file viewable under iOS with FoxTrot Attaché.
• The index files can now optionally contain a compressed copy of the indexed documents, which may be viewed or opened on iOS.
• The index files can now optionally be AES encrypted, which will cause each index access to be password-protected under iOS.

• Improved the mechanism for updating indices, allowing quicker searches while index is being updated.
• Faster display of text documents (plain text, RTF, Word…).

• 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 (for example, when an index is stored on a volume that is currently offline).
• 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.

• FoxTrot 4.5 requires an Intel Mac running OS X 10.6 or later.

• 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.

• 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.

• a crash could occur when toggling the preview mode of a PDF document from plain text to PDF.

• An excerpt containing the found words in every found document can now be shown directly in the result list, offering first-glance search result preview. The indexed text is optionally stored, and is compressed with very high efficiency.
• A plain text version of found documents can now be displayed, when indexed files are located on an offline disk or file server. This allows the indexing off masses of documents on a MacBook and carrying around their plain text shadow, whose essential plain text contents can be viewed when disconnected. If the source hard disk or file server are mounted, the indexed document will appear instead of the plain text representation.

• Added a thumbnail view for PDF files. A badge shows the number of occurrences for each searched word on each page, and thumbnails can be sorted by relevance or by page number.
• 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.

• Most document types can now be zoomed using the pinch gesture.
• If an index previously failed to start, attempting to start it manually by checking it in the search sources list will now propose to rebuild it.
• In a search window with multiple criteria, typing the command-1 to command-8 keyboard shortcuts now affects the currently selected criterion.

• 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.

• 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)

• 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

• Fixed a possible crash when closing a document window before all found words have been highlighted

• Fixed a rare case where FoxTrot would ask for a login and password on launch

• 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
• The indexer could disconnect in some cases when using multiple search criteria if the last one was left empty

• 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

• FoxTrot now uses Quick Look’s engine to preview document types not handled internally, enhanced with FoxTrot’s usual occurrences highlighting and document-level search. 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

• A new search can be started in a background tab by pressing the command key
• Found documents can now be moved to the Finder trash; the index is updated dynamically, and the document will no longer appear under found items in subsequent searches
• 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

• 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
• Less network traffic when FoxTrot Pro is hidden, or in the background
• 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

• update all Update all running indices
• update folder Update the given file or folder (if its contents is indexed in running indices)

• Now remembers the display order of the categories, and which categories were collapsed, from the last search
• Now remembers the search operator (all words, any word…) from the last search
• Control-click will now display contextual menus, unless you have explicitly assigned the control key to something else in the preference pane

• Under certain circumstances, the application could use some CPU resources on idle, when a search result window is visible
• A crash could occur on OS X 10.5 when customizing the toolbar

• 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
• When rebuilding an index, reselect it in the sources
• Fixed the french localization
• Expiration date removed