Spotlight (Mac) searchability of Igor Experiments?

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Tue, 09/30/2014 - 04:47 am

My workflow is to save my procedures that I think will be useful in the future in Documents/Wavemetrics/Igor Pro 6 User Files/User Procedures folder. If I can't remember which procedure file is the one I want, I use a spotlight search for an Igor command to find it. The problem is sometimes I have procedures in experiments that are not saved anywhere else. I don't know how feasible this is, but if pxp files were also searchable by spotlight, it would be very useful to locate procedures within experiments and prevent me from "reinventing the wheel" and writing a new procedure when I'm sure I have done so previously. Just an idea. Feel free to tell me to better organise my Igor files.
You can search procedures in packed experiment files from the Help Browser's Search Igor Files tab.

Select Help->Search Igor Files.

Make sure that Procedure Files is checked and check "Search in packed experiments". You probably also want to press the Choose button to select a target folder to search. You can probably uncheck The Igor Pro Folder and The Igor Pro User Files as search targets if you are searching packed experiments.

The code that loads procedure files from a packed experiment is quite complicated and large. Writing a Spotlight plugin to do that kind of search is not trivial.

September 30, 2014 at 09:02 am - Permalink