A Deep Dive on Eagle Filer

I've built what amounts to a database of my entire digital life stretching back to the early 90s, using the super powers of EagleFiler from C-Command Software and the highly respected, veteran developer, Michael Tsai. EagleFiler is the ultimate everything bucket for my needs. With it I can quickly locate any email, social media post, blog article or work document that I have ever created, plus more. EagleFiler is much faster than Spotlight at finding what I am looking for. It provides a very scalable way to organize, annotate and expand any project.

What's in My EagleFiler

• Nearly 160K emails stretching back to 2005
• Web archives with the original link, and formatting for thousands of web pages imported from my bookmarks and added with convenient system wide tools over the past couple of years.
• I've been blogging off and on since the days of GeoCities, not just on software but a whole gamut of topics. Using tags, folders (including smart folders) and full text searches I can find just about anything I can remember creating. I can add current notes to clarify or highlight any document.
• I made my living as a technical writer and editor during the original dot com bubble and all of my professional work is appropriately tagged and organized in several different formats, including PDF, Word, PowerPoint and text files.
• When I quit using Facebook and Twitter, I got archives of all my posts from those services and imported them into EagleFiler. That's tens of thousands of entries.
• Themed collections of PDFs which include manuals for hardware and software and hundreds of converted ebooks from my various non-technical interests like baseball and US history.
• I was an avid Evernote user back when it was good. I imported every important note rinto EagleFiler, from software registration keys to recipes to accumulated notes on Mac OS X back to version 10.0.

Adding to the Base I Built

EagleFiler isn't just a repository for historical data, it's a great app for organizing projects on an ongoing basis. Using hotkeys, it's easy to quickly add web archives or new blog posts and other documents. If using tags and folders isn't granular enough, you can have multiple libraries. More than one library can be open at the time and multiple pages can be open per library.

EagleFiler uses the finder for the documents you have. There is no duplication caused by importing the very same info into a different database. EagleFiler's own data consists of its index of what you've added, your tags and notes. If you use Finder tags, they remain with the original document. One benefits of using EagleFiler search s that you can skip folders and tags if you aren't inclined to use them and just search for the information you want.

Once you have data in EagleFiler, there's a three-pane interface where you can view and edit files directly, without having to open, close and save in separate apps. You can also quickly create new files of different types in the current folder or tag where you're working.

Exporting your emails from practically any client or service makes gives you a leaner daily driver and can speed up searches in Outlook, Gmail etc. I've encountered more than one person whose sole use of EagleFiler is for email archiving. Rob Griffiths (of the late, great OS X Hints website) said "Import from Mail is ridiculously easy—select a mailbox or a number of messages and press Option-F1 in Mail."

The list of apps that integrate with EagleFiler is long and comprehensive. It includes text editors like Bbedit, browsers including Arc, Brave (and Chrome and other Chromium based browsers), utilities like PopClip and Hookmark, just about the whole gamut of Microsoft and Apple productivity suites, task managers like Omnifocus and even RSS readers like NetNewsWire and Reeder.

Is it Like DevonThink?

Yes and no. At a high level, both products are used to store, search, sort etc. documents in a structured database format. I asked Michael Tsai to give me his stock answer to the inevitable comparison questions and he said "There are many features in common. I know that some people prefer DEVONthink because of one or another feature that it has and EagleFiler lacks. Customers who have used both generally tell me that they prefer EagleFiler because it's easier to use and faster and because of the way it handles e-mail archiving and integration with the Mac file system and other apps."  EagleFiler is $69.99 and if you are the sole user of the app, you can install it on two computers. DevonThink pricing is complicated, but at the simplest level it is $99 for the standard version and $199 for the pro version that also includes the companion mobile app.

What's New

The latest (free) update to EagleFiler was in October, 2025 includes the following enhancements:

• The capture key now works with DEVONthink 4.
• The share extension can now import images with no associated file, e.g. from the Quick Look preview window after taking a screenshot.
• Fixed a bug where tag searches with negative conditions sometimes didn't find any matches when Match Partial Words was unchecked.
• Worked around a Help Viewer bug on macOS 14.
• Updated the documentation for macOS Tahoe 26. The current version works with macOS 13 through Tahoe. Legacy versions of the app are available if you run an older operating system.

The Road Ahead

When I asked Michael about his plans for the future of EagleFiler her gave me quite a list. "The top priority is making it fully Apple Silicon native and at the same time rewriting it in Swift. Another high priority is adding a widescreen view (i.e. with the preview pane on the side instead of the bottom). Lots more new features, optimizations, and refinements are planned. I love EagleFiler as is (and use it every day to run my life as well as to help develop the app itself), but I think there's so much potential to make it even better."

I asked about the Rosetta issue and he explained, "It's compatible with Apple Silicon Macs, but currently only part of the app (the indexer and web page fetcher) runs natively, so Rosetta is still required." This can be a deal breaker for some folks, so you've been warned.