Tidzy vs Spotlight
Spotlight is brilliant at launching apps and finding files you can name. Tidzy is for the files you can only describe.
Short answer
Keep Spotlight for apps, calculations and files you know the name of. Use Tidzy when you remember what a file was rather than what it’s called: where it came from, roughly when, what was in it. Tidzy also cleans up, names screenshots and finds sensitive files, which Spotlight doesn’t do.
Side by side
| Spotlight | Tidzy | |
|---|---|---|
| Launch apps, do maths | Yes | No |
| Find a file by name | Yes | Yes |
| Plain-English requests like “pdfs from gmail last week” | Partly, with keywords | Yes |
| Search by where a file was downloaded from | No | Yes |
| Read text inside screenshots | Limited | Yes, on-device |
| Browse results as a visual grid | No | Yes |
| Clean up, duplicates, sensitive files | No | Yes, with undo |
Use both
They work well together. Spotlight lives on ⌘Space; Tidzy’s Quick Find lives on ⇧⌘Space, so the next search is always one shortcut away.
Try it on your own files
From $4.99, one time, for 1, 2 or 3 Macs. Everything runs on your Mac, and every action can be undone.