Comparisons

Cling, reviewed

Updated 2026-08-05 · 6 min read

Cling is one of two Mac apps that build their own filename index instead of asking Spotlight. It is worth your attention, and worth knowing where it stops.

What it is

Cling is a file finder by The Low-Tech Guys, the developer behind Lunar and rcmd. It builds, in its own words, "a binary index of your entire filesystem", tracks changes live through FSEvents, and searches that index with fuzzy matching. It advertises results in under 100 ms on a typical search across nine million or more files.

It is keyboard-first. You summon it, type, and act on the result without touching the mouse — that is the whole design, and it is executed well.

What it does better than Spotlight

It sees what Spotlight hides. System files, hidden files, dotfiles, application data. Spotlight deliberately omits these; Cling deliberately includes them. For anyone who has gone looking for a config file, that difference alone justifies it.

It is honest about the index. Spotlight's index is opaque and its failures are silent — the standard advice for "Spotlight cannot find my file" is to rebuild the whole thing and wait. An app that owns its index can tell you what is in it.

Fuzzy matching. Type srcmgr, get SourceManager.swift. Once you are used to it, exact substring search feels clumsy.

The three limits

macOS 14 or later. Cling requires Sonoma. Plenty of Macs that Apple dropped from the Sonoma list are still in daily use, and they are disproportionately the ones with a decade of files on them.

Result caps. The free mode returns up to 500 results; Pro raises that to 10,000. That is generous, but it is a cap, and broad queries on a large disk reach it.

Filenames only. Cling's page states plainly that search is name-based rather than content or metadata driven. That is a legitimate design decision for a fuzzy finder — but if the thing you remember is a phrase inside a document, a filename index cannot help you, and no amount of fuzzy matching changes that.

The price

€12, lifetime, with a 14-day trial of Pro and a permanently free mode after it. That is inexpensive for a tool you will use several times a day, and the free tier means you can find out whether you are one of the people who uses it several times a day before paying.

Who should use it

Anyone on Sonoma or later who searches by filename, wants results instantly, and wants to reach the parts of the disk Spotlight pretends are not there.

Anyone who needs to search inside documents, or is on Ventura, needs something else — and we make one of the something elses, which is a bias you should read the rest of this site with in mind.

Common questions

Is Cling free?

There is a permanently free mode capped at 500 results, plus a 14-day trial of Pro. A Pro licence is €12 as a one-time purchase.

Does Cling search inside files?

No. Cling's own product page describes search as name-based rather than content or metadata driven. It matches filenames and paths.

What macOS does Cling need?

macOS 14.0 Sonoma or later. It will not install on Ventura or anything older.