New File Finding App, Cling, Is Not Everything

I recently saw a new Mac file finding app, Cling, announced on Macupdate and Thriftmac. The description of the app said that it brings fuzzy search to a utility with a GUI. Searches with partial or misspelled file names are promised to work. The developer's website states that the app is designed to be similar in function to the legendary Windows file finding utility, Everything, which is indeed, one of the best file finding apps I have ever used. I've installed it for many users who needed to search network drives containing thousands of files.

I read the documentation on the website which went into detail about the amount of CPU power consumed and the memory needed to run Cling. Logically, since it does not use the Spotlight index like some other search tools, it needed time after starting the first time to create its own index. The website said that it takes about five minutes. I gave it a couple of hours. I ran my first seach using the word Obsidian as my search term. I've written several articles and taken a lot of notes about the app by that name. I wanted to see what Cling would return. To my surprise and dismay, it returned a list of folders with Obsidian in the path name. I tried several other searches and discovered that including a file extension helped it locate files to some extent. The results Windows only shows 30 results by default, which you can adjust up to 100, but there is no way to have it show you all the files it finds that match what you are searching for.

To compare the results, I used Find any File, another Mac file-finding utility that builds its own indez. A search for Obsidian returned 4,734 hits, all of which it displayed for me to sort and search through. I did not have to try different file extensions, nor did my results contain unrelated folders that had Obsidian in the path name. I was much happier with the results.

Other Mac search utilities that worked better for me are:

• Tembo
• Easy Find
• Houdahspot

Response from the Developer

Dev here, thanks for the review!

I’ve been a user of Everything for many years so I’m very much aware I’m not even 10% of that app. But as I try to convey this info on the website:

Cling strives to be similar to the popular Everything app from Windows, with macOS native integration and a focus on power users.

The app is still in its infancy and there’s a lot to work on. It’s more of a prototype to see if I can get something useful with as little work as possible (although it’s still been a month of non stop work anyway)

I’ll never get Cling to be like Everything, there’s just too much work to do on things I don’t have time to work on. But I want to at least bring the core of the Everything experience on Mac

To answer some of your concerns:

• yes, because the index uses fzf for search, it also matches the path, not only the file name. This needs to default to the file name only first and then search the path, I’ll have to find a way to do that somehow.
• Network drives support is almost done, will be released with the next update.
• the number of results is capped by fzf for now, I’ll probably need to fork it and add my own code to make it work better for my use case, but it will be done

That was good feedback, thanks! I hope to get to a state where this app will be a good choice for simple file finding tasks. But don’t expect it to get all the Everything complex metadata syntax, or crazy features like an FTP server etc.