GUIDE · PDF SEARCH
Short answer: if you remember the exact words, type them into Spotlight or a Finder search; both look inside PDFs. If you only remember what the PDF was about, describe it to Shlexball: “the lease PDF that mentions the security deposit”. It reads the PDFs in a folder you choose, on your Mac, and shows each match with the passage that matched.
24 September 2026 · 4 minute read
Downloaded PDFs rarely have useful names. In this folder the lease is scan_0412.pdf, the research paper is paper_v2_FINAL.pdf and the tax form is stmt_2025.pdf. None of the searches below uses a file name.
Recorded on an Apple silicon Mac with the model running on the Mac, in a sample folder of made-up documents.
Watch the 1-minute video on YouTube · More how-to videos
| What we typed | What Shlexball found | Also looked for |
|---|---|---|
| the lease PDF that mentions the security deposit | scan_0412.pdf, a residential lease with a $2,400 deposit | rental agreement, tenancy agreement |
| research paper about sleep and memory | paper_v2_FINAL.pdf, “Sleep Spindles and Overnight Memory Consolidation” | thesis, dissertation, learning |
| the tax form PDF showing my interest income | stmt_2025.pdf, a Form 1099-INT | form 1040, interest earned |
Each answer arrived a few seconds after pressing Find. The result card shows the PDF’s opening lines, so you can tell it is the right one before you open it.
mdfind -onlyin ~/Documents "security deposit" asks the Spotlight index directly.All four match the words you type. That works when you remember the wording. It fails when you remember the subject: your lease may say “tenancy” where you typed “rental”, and your tax form says “1099-INT”, not “interest tax form”. Spotlight also ranks a 4 MB export that mentions a word once alongside the one-page document you actually want. There is a side-by-side test of Spotlight and Shlexball on the same search.
Yes. Spotlight and Finder search the text of PDFs that Spotlight has indexed, so a PDF that contains the words you type will show up. They match words, not meaning, so you need to remember how the document was worded.
Describe it. In Shlexball, type something like “the lease PDF that mentions the security deposit”. A language model running on your Mac turns that into a search of the text inside your PDFs, then shows each match with the passage it found.
No. The model runs on your Mac and your PDFs are read on your Mac. Optional sharing of search prompts is off until you turn it on, and shared diagnostics never include document contents. See the privacy policy.
Not the text inside them yet: Shlexball has no OCR. A scanned PDF still shows up when its file name matches what you asked for. PDFs that already carry a text layer are searched.
No. Shlexball skips PDFs that need a password.
Plain text, Markdown, Word (.docx), Excel (.xlsx and .xlsm), CSV and TSV files.
Yes. The first setup downloads about 3.1 GB of model files. After that, searches run with no internet connection. The offline guide was recorded with Wi-Fi switched off.
macOS 15 or later on Apple silicon with 16 GB of memory. The first 30 searches are free with no account, then it is $9 a month or $59 a year. See pricing.
Think of a PDF you can describe but cannot name, and ask for it.
▶ DOWNLOAD SHLEXBALLmacOS 15 or later. Apple silicon. 16 GB memory.