Disks and indexing

Espresso keeps an index of every disk you choose: the name, size, dates and location of every file and folder. Searching the index is what makes results instant.

Grinding: the first indexing

When you add a disk, Espresso grinds it: it goes through every folder once. On a typical Mac the startup disk takes less than a minute; large external drives take longer. You can already search while it works — results appear as files are found — and follow its progress in the status bar or in the sidebar.

Need the disk's full speed back for a moment? Right-click the disk › Pause Grinding, and Resume Grinding later. Stop Grinding stops for now: Espresso starts again the next time the disk is connected.

Brewing: staying up to date

While Espresso is open, it follows every change on your disks — new, renamed, moved and deleted files show up in the results within about a second. When you open Espresso again, it catches up with everything that changed while it was closed, usually in seconds.

Espresso doesn't run in the background once you quit it.

Offline disks

Unplug an indexed disk and it moves to Offline Disks in the sidebar, in grey, with the date of its last update. Its index stays on your Mac: search it, browse it, get info about its files. Reconnect it and Espresso catches up with any changes, then moves it back under Disks.

Right-click a disk in the sidebar:

Item	What it does
Rename…	Give the disk a label in Espresso (the disk itself isn't renamed). Handy for similar backup drives.
Update Index	Check the whole disk for changes now, without starting over.
Fresh Grind	Rebuild the disk's index from scratch. Use it after changing excluded folders.
Pause / Resume / Stop Grinding	While a disk is being indexed.
Show in Finder	Open the disk in Finder (connected disks).
Folders Couldn't Be Read…	Lists folders that were skipped because they need Full Disk Access.
Remove Index…	Forget the disk. No files are deleted. You can index it again later.

Excluded folders (Decaf)

Keep folders out of the index — build folders, caches, private folders — in Settings › Disks › Decaf · Excluded folders: click + and choose folders, or tick common names such as node_modules, .git, DerivedData, .build, Pods, __pycache__, .venv, target to skip them wherever they are. The folders themselves still appear in results; their contents don't. Changes apply the next time a disk is updated — choose Fresh Grind to apply them right away.

Hidden files and packages

Hidden files (and everything inside hidden folders, such as ~/Library) are always indexed but not shown, like in Finder. Show them with Show Hidden Files (⇧⌘.), with Lungo (⌥⌘L), with hidden: in a search, or always from Settings › Disks.

The contents of apps and other packages (for example Photos Library.photoslibrary) are indexed and shown by default; you can hide them in Settings › Disks.

Folders Espresso can't read

Folders protected by privacy settings (Mail, Messages, Safari, other apps' data…) need Full Disk Access. Until you grant it, the status bar says how many folders were skipped.
Folders reserved for macOS — protected by System Integrity Protection or owned by system services — can't be opened by any app, not even Finder. Espresso skips them silently.

Network volumes

Shared folders on other computers and NAS (SMB, NFS) are off by default. Turn on Index network volumes in Settings › Disks. They can take a long time to index and may not report changes, so use Update Index when you need them fresh.

Extended details and tags

After indexing, Espresso slowly reads extra details in the background, for the kinds of files you choose in Settings › Metadata: image dimensions and date taken, audio and video duration, document author and page count, and Finder tags. They're kept for offline disks too. Search them with width:, height:, duration:, pages:, author:, tag: and tagged:, or show them as columns.