Extend Spotlight’s search capabilities to look inside ZIP files
Posted by JohnnyAppleseed | Under Configuration, Review, Software, Utility Thursday May 8, 2008Those used to downloading files and software intended for use on Windows-based machines know that there are a wide variety of compression formats out there. Mac users have it a bit easier - it is very rare that you will see a file intended for use with a Mac compressed using anything other than the zip formap. The main exception is that once in a while you’ll get a file with a .tgz extension, which is a compressed Unix tarball, but that’s fairly rare. The main reason for the standardization of the zip format is that it’s the format the Mac uses natively, for example when you right click on a file or folder (or a group of files and/or folders) in Finder, and choose the “Compress” option.
Compressing files saves a lot of space, but one drawback has been that you can’t use Spotlight to find the file within the archive. However, one interesing thing about Mac OS X is that you can extend its capabilities by using plugins. Bartas Technologies offers Ziplight, a freeware Spotlight importer plugin that lets you use Spotlight to find files within zip archives.
We know of only two limitations with this plugin. The first is that it only works under the Tiger or Leopard versions of OS X. The second is that Ziplight will only search the names of the files within a zip archive, not the actual contents (so you can’t search for a text string within a compressed file, for example) - it would take far too long to uncompress every file on every volume on your system, in an attempt to find the searched-for string. But if you know the file name (or a significant portion thereof), and you have installed this plugin, Spotlight should be able to find it for you.
Installing Ziplight is easy - double click on the .dmg file, agree to the license terms, then view the included “Read Me.pdf” file for installation instructions. If you’re new to the Mac you may not quite understand what they are telling you to do, so let us break it down for you. You have to drag the Ziplight plugin (the Ziplight.mdimporter file from the disk image), but since it’s a plugin and not an application, you do not drag it into your Applications directory. Instead, you drag it into a particular directory specifically intended for Spotlight plugins. Easy enough, except there are two such directories on your system - /Library/Spotlight and ~/Library/Spotlight/ (the first is off the root directory, the second off of your user home folder).
If you install the plugin in ~/Library/Spotlight/ it will only be available to you, not to any other user on your Mac. This is probably not what you want (even if you are the only user of your Mac), so we’d suggest dragging the plugin file to the /Library/Spotlight file off the system’s root folder. That will make it useable by all users on your system, plus we think it’s probably better to keep all your Spotlight plugins together in the same directory.
Note that you will need to restart your system, or at least logout and then log back in, before the plugin will become active - and after that it will take some time for Spotlight to index all your zip files. We do wish that maybe there was a way that it could take a bit more time and index the contents of those files (after all, since it’s doing it as a background task, it’s not like it’s under a time constraint) but we’ll take what we can get, and having the ability to find filenames within zip files can be downright handy at times.
There are many other available plugins that can extend the capabilities of your Mac. For example, there is a whole page of plugins that will extend the capabilities of QuickLook, which are installed in a very similar manner (they go into a different directory than the Spotlight plugins, but install just as easily). As you become more familiar with your Mac, you’ll almost certainly want to install more of these little helpers that make OS X work smarter!
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