Brand new to Devonthink - only used it for 48H but already in love!
Have a stupid question and have tried to find an answer but failed.
I can not get Spotlight or Launchbar 6 to search inside my Devonthink Office PRO database.
Have followed Apple tips of having the entire hard drive excluded and then included in Spotlight/Privacy
Have created an Spotlight index inside Devonthink
Not a big deal, bought the Devonsphere as well and even searching within the Davonthink is lightning fast. Just that I don´t get address book or iPhoto or any other Apple native apps.
If the option to provide index information to Spotlight is checked in DEVONthink’s Database Properties panel, you will be able to search your databases via Spotlight, whether they are open or closed at the time.
When the Spotlight results appear, I usually click on the option to view results in the Finder. Items within a DEVONthink database have the blue shell logo, and are likely to appear under the “Other” header.
To view such a result, select it and press the Space bar to view via Quick Look, or double-click the item to view it within the DEVONthink environment.
See attached screen shots from DevonThink, Spotlight prefs and Launcher index prefs.
Think LaunchBar uses Spotlights Index.
Can also use DevonSphere and skip Apples spotlight in total but not sure how to get Launchbar to index DevonThinks index. Asked Launchbar/Obdevs support yesterday.
No big deal, just nice to learn at least 10% of the capabilities of this great system called DevonThink!
I am still working on this issue - both with Apple and the developer of Launchbar 6.
Seems that neither Spotlight or Launchbar will acknowledge the index that Devonthink creates.
But again, not a big deal - I have a feeling that it is much smarter to search WITHIN the Devonthink app on my computer I did buy the Devonsphere Express app but it seems that that app is finding less than Devonthink itself.
However - here is a copy of the answer from the great developer of Launchbar. Austrian or German guy so a real high quality on their support !
[i]LaunchBar works rather independently from Spotlight by using its own indexing settings.
Similar to the categories you can define for Spotlight at ‘OS X System Preferences > Spotlight > Search Results’, you would need to create indexing rules within LaunchBar in order to tell it what items you want to be accessible.
Please open the LaunchBar Index Window (e.g. via Shortcut ⌥⌘I) and add the files you would like to be searchable via LaunchBar. You can also set detailed options for the folders to index only certain files, folders, subfolder depth, etc.
To be honest, I’m not familiar with Devonthink and I don’t know how its database is structured, but possibly it works when you add the database and adjust the options for the indexing rule to the Search Scope: Search all Subfolders and enable ‘Search file package contents’.
[/i]
I don’t know about LaunchBar (or care) but it is absolutely not true that Spotlight is not aware of the Spotlight index that DEVONthink creates. Spotlight works perfectly well with that index.
You’re munging together several unrelated things. Searching using the Find or Search features in DEVONthink have nothing to do with Spotlight. You do not want Spotlight or LaunchBar (or anything else) mucking around inside your databases.
It seems LaunchBar gave you their generic answer without themselves understanding the question.
What is the trick to get a Spotlight to acknowledge the Devonthink Index?
I did publish screen shots of my settings in Spotligt, but deleted them since somebody thought they were to large to post and disturbed the screen.
When I search inside DevonThink for a document with a certain content I get let’s say 233 hits, when I do the same search in DevonExpress I get 186 and when searching in Spotlight I get 3.
Read the reference section in Help or the manual. Have the database create the Spotlight index. Use correct Spotlight syntax. Or use DEVONsphere Express.
(Thanks for not posting massive screenshots – they are impossible to read and not helpful in most cases.)
Search predicates and controls can vary in each of these contexts. The tools each use different approaches to search.
That’s not really what you would use LaunchBar for. It’s not so much as search tool as an application launcher and a keyboard way to traverse the file system. It’s excellent at what ti does but it’s about files and not content, and so not aimed at the same use as DevonThink.
You can perform Spotlight searches with LaunchBar, which is useful if you want to use only one tool to search/launch apps, etc. That’s how I used to search in Spotlight before Yosemite (which has a much improved version of Spotlight).
Thanks you Greg. I think my thread is getting a bit off topic.
The search function inside Devonthink is really outstanding.
Since I have all my 17.000 files that I need to search amongst inside Devonthink it feels so much smarter to use the quality search function that Devonthink provides instead of relaying on Apples more “coarse” and less exact Spotlight.
I use Spotlight for things I do NOT want in Devonthink like music, movies, ebooks etc.
After watching a tutorial videos yesterday I can however see that being able to add ebooks to the system would be great. Lots of information to search for in a epub.
When it comes to Launchbar and integration with Devonthink I can leave that for now.
I have set the Devonthink app to start with Yosemite so app is always running.
!