This document shows you how to use Raycast’s new file search, with a new engine independent of Apple’s Spotlight index. Some of the key differences compared to Spotlight:
Note: We do not yet support searching the contents in files. If you heavily rely on this feature, you might want to stay on the Spotlight engine for now.
Make sure to be logged into your Raycast Account and enable the new engine by opening File Search Preferences (Preferences > Extensions > File Search) and switch to Raycast (Beta). After your files have been indexed, you can perform searches via the File Search command
Raycast stores data about relevant files in an index that we keep up-to-date with the file system, in the background. When you open File Search with the new engine selected, you might see the indexing progress. (More details are shown in preferences.) We show your last used files by default, that is, the files that you’ve recently opened in Finder.
Raycast can now index file contents for some file types. This means that it will attempt to extract text content from files and the files can be searched for by some words that appears in their content. No file contents are sent over the network.
The feature is enabled by default, but you have full control over which files get indexed for content.In the File Search extension settings, ensure the Enable Content Indexing checkbox is ticked, and press the Add directories button below to whitelist specific directories where Raycast should index file contents.
The same rules and filters that apply to the regular file indexing will apply here - see the Ignoring section for more information.Content Indexing will run on the lowest priority threads in your OS so as to not get in the way of your work, so it can take some time depending on how many files it needs to index.Supported file types at the moment include:
.docx.odt.rtf.pdf (some files are known to not be indexable)