Those who save a large number of files and usually have to search for a term within them, SearchLight is an application that may be essential. One of the most relevant aspects of the application is that it uses the Spotlight database and therefore does not have to index information, since our Mac will have done it to work with SpotLight.
So if we have this native application, why use SearchLight? For several reasons that we will see in the article, but they are summarized in: little consumption of resources and more information than that offered by Spotlight.
The first thing to indicate that the developer has used Swift, Apple's development language, so that the implementation of the application within macOS is ideal. The second, to indicate that the qualitative advantage of SearchLight is the presentation of results, which although it is highly crude, offers much more information.
Among the information it shows, we can know in which line the term we are looking for is located, and optionally the context where the word is found, to recognize if it is what we are looking for. This application allows us to see the file without having to open it in the application, just by clicking on the result.
In the case of Spotlight, it shows us the files where this term is found and offers us the possibility of previewing the file. Generally, this information is insufficient and we click on the file, so that it opens in the macOS Preview application and after searching for the term in question in the box at the top right, it will show us, highlighted in yellow, the term or terms that We are looking for.
SearchLight has filters to make our search more accurate. Among them is: name, date of the file, or search only files that contain two words, just adding the + symbol between them. Lastly, the application can be configured with all kinds of keyboard shortcuts.
Application Search Light is free at the time of writing, and you can access the websites from the developer to know more details of it or download it.