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Cardinal 0.2.0

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@franciscoxc franciscoxc released this 01 Aug 23:48
v0.2.0
fe7a010

First release of this fork. Cardinal is an excellent search engine wrapped in an interface that hides it; this release starts pulling the power up to the surface.

Download

Cardinal_0.2.0_aarch64.dmg — Apple silicon, macOS 12 or later.

Signed with a Developer ID and notarized by Apple, so it opens without Gatekeeper warnings. Open the DMG, drag Cardinal to Applications, and grant Full Disk Access when macOS asks — Cardinal needs it to index and watch your files.

SHA-256  a07d3d03a38441364dad869cd8cdc278b0b5ac55c68dbfdf9c00d2a3454a39de

What's new

A file-type dropdown next to the search bar. Picking a type writes it into the query — type:image — instead of hiding in the control, so the search bar stays the single source of truth and the syntax is there to be learned. A query the dropdown cannot represent faithfully (a negated !type:, two of them, one inside a boolean group) reads as "Custom" and is left alone.

type:email. Covers .eml, .emlx, .emlxpart, .msg and .mbox, with mail and message as synonyms. Apple Mail's formats are the ones nobody finds by name.

Content searches show what they matched. A content: search now has a context column with the surrounding text from inside each file and the searched term highlighted.

"Folder scope" is now "Search in", in all 15 languages.

The search input has an accessible name, so screen readers can announce it. Thanks to @dkattan (#220).

Under the hood

  • Content snippets are extracted by the search engine itself, next to the matcher they mirror, sharing its chunked read and Rabin-Karp finder rather than a second implementation in the app.
  • Highlighted content terms come from the real query parser: !content: no longer highlights, and content:"Bearer " keeps its trailing space.
  • Result rows hydrate in parallel, so icon and snippet reads no longer queue behind each other.
  • The app now uses its own bundle identifier, com.franxc.cardinal, so it never collides with an upstream install on the same Mac.

Credits

Cardinal was created by cardisoft and is MIT licensed. This fork continues that work; the search engine is theirs.

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