The drive is not plugged in. The result is real — path, size, date, and a snippet
cached the last time it was connected.
macOS · on device · no account
Spotlight forgets a drive the moment you eject it. Foveate keeps it indexed, tells you which drive to plug in, and shows you the text — with the disk still in a drawer.
14-day trial · Free CLI forever · Apple Silicon, macOS 14+
One index. Three ways to search it. Nothing leaves the machine.
Documents are tagged with the volume's UUID, so a drive that comes back as “Archive 1” is still the same disk. Results name the drive to plug in.
“My espresso tastes harsh” finds the note about bitter extraction. BM25 and on-device embeddings, fused — never one pretending to be the other.
PDF through Apple's own PDFKit, plus Word, Excel and PowerPoint — and text inside images on request, via Vision. A password-locked PDF is findable by name and never by content.
FSEvents, not a re-scan. Write a file and it is searchable seconds later, with no crawl and no spinning fans.
SMB and NFS, polled and diffed so unchanged files are never re-read. An unreachable share never deletes your index.
Kill it whenever. Re-run and it continues. Newest files first, so the half you are most likely to search is done first, and it reports minutes rather than a spinner.
From runs on an M1 Pro against a real 310,461-file, 46.8 GB tree. The scripts that produced them ship in the repository, so you can re-run them on your own.
| Measurement | Result |
|---|---|
| First index — 310,461 files / 46.8 GB | 342 s |
| Search across 310k documents | 42 ms |
| New file written → findable | 3.1 s |
| Paraphrase recall@5 — keyword vs hybrid · separate 24-doc set | 50% → 75% |
| Exact-match recall, unharmed by the above · same set | 100% |
the two recall rows come from 16 hand-labelled queries over a 24-document corpus — a small set, deliberately separate from the timing rows above, and we say so
Same engine as the app. Free forever, MIT, no licence, no limits.
The panel ships as a DMG from this site. macOS 14 or later, Apple Silicon. Indexing needs Full Disk Access — macOS asks once, on first run, and the app tells you why.
Start free. Pay once for the panel. There is no subscription, because there is no server to pay for.
Open source. MIT.
One payment. Free updates through 1.x.
Checkout opens shortly. Until then, email and a key comes back the same day.
Worth knowing before you pay, not after.
No app launching, no calculator, no workflows. Raycast and Alfred own that. Foveate should be called from them.
No moving, renaming, tagging, deleting or de-duplicating. Finding is the whole product.
Audio and video are transcribed on device at 26× realtime, and images are read with --ocr at about 60× a normal crawl. Both are opt-in, per file, and never run during an ordinary crawl.
Unsupported. Their container format is undocumented, so those files are found by name only.
It is built on FSEvents, DiskArbitration, PDFKit and the Neural Engine. A port would be a rewrite.
Then Spotlight is free and fine — use it. Foveate is for archives bigger than the laptop.
It indexed the drive while it was. The text, every attribute and a 512-byte snippet of each file stay on your Mac. You cannot open the file until you plug the drive back in — Foveate tells you which one, by name.
No. No account, no telemetry, no licence server — the licence is a signed token verified offline. The embedding model is downloaded once (130 MB) and then runs locally on the Neural Engine.
342 seconds for 310,491 files across 44.8 GB. It is resumable — kill it whenever and re-run to continue — and it indexes newest files first, so the half you are most likely to search finishes first.
Nothing, because there is nothing to stop paying. One payment, perpetual licence. Your index and licence live outside the app bundle, so deleting and reinstalling loses neither.
Because it is how you find out whether this works on your archive before paying for anything. The CLI is the whole engine and it is MIT. The panel — the hotkey, the warm model, the offline badges — is what costs $39.
Yes, in beta and opt-in. Shares have no change notifications, so they are polled and diffed every six hours. An unreachable share never deletes what it already indexed.