My own solution to too much documentation (ie instruction manuals, reference files, PDFs and so on) is FoxTrot Pro. (There is also a less expensive personal edition, and an upgrade path.)

I’ve been around the block on this (Spotlight; HoudahSpot; SOHO Notes; Devon Think Pro; Yojimbo; Shove Box; Eagle Filer… and probably several I forgot.)

I still use Devon Think Pro for “heavy lifting” because of it’s massive range of features, but FoxTrot offers something convenient and easy to use. When I just want to look up something I want fast, take me right to it responses. FoxTrot offers that.

Here’s what’s so: You tell FoxTrot what folders to monitor. Just drag your files into the folders. They just sit there, and FT indexes them. It does not copy them somewhere else or otherwise muck about with them. It’s not some special folder either – it may be folders you already have (as it was in my case – a couple of folders of documents that already existed; some PDFs, some sample code, so on.)

That’s the first nice thing: I don’t have to rethink how things are in the first place.

Next, it puts a quick-search into your menu bar, just like spotlight’s search.

type in what you’re looking for. For example, I might enter a search for “NKImageView” (which is an object in a programming language.)

FT does not not need to be running, but if it’s not it will launch. Takes about three second. If it is running, results are virtually instantaneous. Faster than Spotlight (largely because, I’d assume, you’ve limited the scope by specify a few particular folders.)

Up pops a screen listing the documents where it’s found. Doubleclick the document, and it opens up a screen with NKImageView highlighted in the table of contents, and a sidebar with a list of every place within that document where the word appears (with a bit of surrounding text.)

Click on the contents or anything in the sidebar, and you’re right at the page.

With FT running, total time from hitting enter on my return to the results? Faster than I can measure. 1/20 of a second? Time to click on the PDF filename and the selection within it? I dunno: how fast can you click?

Bottom line: very fast, very convenient, and at least for me (as a programmer, and a person with too much software documentation [even for non-programming things]) exactly the right solution.

www.ctmdev.com/foxtrot/personal_search/