When you start Tembo, a new window opens. Start typing to initiate a search. Use the sidebar to configure the search: sort order, time frame and location.
Results are grouped by type. For each group, Tembo lists the top ten matches according to the sort order set in the sidebar. You may configure which groups are enabled and in what order they are shown from the Preferences window.
Click the arrow button on a group header to drill down into that group. Tembo will list up to 2,500 matches. Rather than have you scroll through the long list to find the desired result, Tembo provides filters to narrow down the list.
| Bookmarks: | Type, URL Domain |
| Documents: | File Type |
| Fonts: | File Type |
| Images: | Resolution, File Type |
| Messages: | Subject, From, To |
| Movies: | File Type, Codec |
| Music: | Artist, File Type |
| PDF Documents: | Author |
| Source Code: | File Type |
Double-click a file to open it.
Hold the option key while double-clicking to send Tembo to the background
Hit the space bar to get a QuickLook preview of the file
Control-click or right-click to access the context menu
The best approach to take is to further narrow down the search by entering more information in the search field.
You may also change the sort order using the sidebar next to the grouped results. While the file may not be among the 2,500 last modified files, it may be among the 2,500 last opened or created files.
From the sidebar you may also narrow the search scope or time frame.
By default Tembo searches file names, text contents as well as any other text attributes indexed by Spotlight.
Tembo's simple query language to let you control which attributes are searched. For this you need to prefix the searched for word with one of the following keywords:
| name: | search only file names |
| text: | search only text contents |
| any: | search any text attribute but the name and text contents |
| tags: | search only OpenMeta tags |
| whereFrom: | search the files' origins |
Example:
'text:Houdah name:Tembo' searches for files whose name
contains Tembo
and whose contents includes Houdah
.
'whereFrom:iChat text:Tembo' searches for iChat
transcripts which contain Tembo
.
Tembo searches for word prefixes. Searching for 'Paris' matches
Paris
and parison
, but not comparison
. Searching
for 'Window' matches "MyWindowClass" and "Broken Window"
You may use the * wildcard to control text matching. A search
string of '*paris*' matches comparison
. If no wildcard is
specified, Tembo assumes a wildcard at the end of the word.
You may add quotes to the search string to disable word matching
in favor of pharse matching. Searching for 'name:*.txt
' matches
only files with a .txt
extension.
Tembo searches the Spotlight index. Some files and locations are permanently excluded from indexing. You may have excluded further locations using the Privacy tab in Spotlight preferences.
Spotlight relies upon importer plug-ins to index files. Application vendors need to provide the importers for the custom file formats they create. It is left up to them to decide what attributes the importers expose to the Spotlight index.
