REVIEW · FULL-TEXT SEARCH
Verdict: FoxTrot Search is worth it for professionals who search large document collections by their exact words: lawyers, researchers, journalists and publishers. It indexes hundreds of formats, ranks results, shows the exact excerpts and offers proximity search. For an ordinary Mac with a few thousand files, it is more engine than you need.
2 November 2026 · By Ishtiaque Hossain · 4 minute read · reviews FoxTrot Search 8.6
Looking for a file you can describe but not name? Try Shlexball. The first 30 searches are free and need no account.
macOS 15 or later. Apple silicon. 16 GB memory. On a phone? Email yourself the link.
This review is based on FoxTrot Search's own pages, read on 14 October 2026. Every claim links to the page it came from. We are the makers of Shlexball, so we say plainly where FoxTrot Search does better.
| Editions | Personal; Professional (single user, 5 users, or 10 to 100 users with Search Server) |
| Price | Sold through a Paddle store, prices including tax shown at checkout |
| What it searches | Text in PDF, Word, Pages, Excel, Numbers, PowerPoint, Keynote, email, HTML and 300 more formats |
| Scale | From 10,000 to 2,000,000 files, or 10GB to 23TB, with results in seconds |
| Version | 8.6, released October 28th, 2025 |
| Best for | Legal, research, publishing and workgroup document archives |
FoxTrot Search is a professional full-text search engine for document collections on the Mac. Where Spotlight returns files, FoxTrot ranks, filters and refines the results, then takes you straight to the exact excerpts, with a preview and highlighting.
It reads PDF, Word, Pages, Excel, Numbers, PowerPoint, Keynote, email, HTML and database files, plus 300 more formats, including formats Spotlight ignores.
FoxTrot keeps its own indices. You can create separate ones for active projects, archives and client files, search each on its own or all at once, and index external drives, NAS and network drives.
Proximity search finds documents where two concepts appear near each other. You drag a slider to set how many words apart they may be, and FoxTrot says no other macOS search tool has this.
The live preview pane highlights your search terms and lets you copy text from any found document without launching Word, Preview or another app.
For teams, FoxTrot Search Server shares a single searchable index, with encryption, per-user access rights and remote administration, and handles tens of terabytes of content.
Scale is the headline claim: whether you have 10,000 files or 2,000,000, FoxTrot says it returns relevance-ranked results in seconds, tested at publishing scale.
FoxTrot comes as Personal Search and Professional Search. Professional is sold for a single user, for 5 users, and in packs of 10, 20, 35, 50 or 100 users that include Search Server.
Licences are bought through a Paddle store with automatic serial numbers; prices including tax appear at checkout rather than on the page we read. An alternative store charges in US dollars only, with manual key generation that can take up to one business day.
You can upgrade from Personal to Professional, or from single-user to multi-user, inside the app, and a version 8 registration code also works with FoxTrot 7.
FoxTrot names its audience: legal professionals searching case files, contracts and briefs; journalists and researchers tracking quotes across thousands of PDFs; academics indexing research libraries; and workgroups sharing one index.
Its user stories are about scale, such as a publishing company with 23TB of data and well over 2 million files, and a scholar finding approximate Latin quotations across 1,500 years of authors.
FoxTrot is made by CTM Development SA in Geneva, Switzerland, and has run natively on Apple silicon since version 7.0.4.
For exact text, FoxTrot is about as strong as Mac search gets: ranked results, filters, proximity search and excerpts let you go from a phrase to the paragraph that contains it.
Its strength assumes you know the words, or words near each other, that appear in the document. That suits a lawyer looking for a clause, and suits less well someone who only remembers what a file was about.
Shlexball is for the opposite case: you describe what a file was about in plain English, and it finds it by searching file and folder names and the text inside files, including PDFs and Word documents.
It needs no index to set up, searches your folders directly, and runs its language model on your Mac. The first 30 searches are free and need no account.
No query syntax: Shlexball finds files that are about your request. 30 free searches.
▶ DOWNLOAD SHLEXBALLThe professional edition of FoxTrot Search, a full-text search engine for Mac document collections, with ranked results, excerpts, proximity search and multiple indices. Multi-user packs include Search Server.
Licences for Personal and Professional are sold through a Paddle store that shows prices including tax at checkout. Multi-user Professional packs range from 5 to 100 users.
Yes. You can index external drives, NAS and network drives, and Search Server lets a team share one index.
Yes. FoxTrot has had native Apple silicon support since version 7.0.4, and the current version is 8.6.