To search in DigUp, press ⇧⌘Space on a Mac or Ctrl+Shift+Space on Windows and Linux and describe what you are looking for in your own words. Exact words like invoice numbers, error codes, and names are also matched as written in file names and document text, so one search gets both the meaning and the exact string. Start a query with code: to search code folders once you turn on code search.
Search examples
| Search | What it finds |
|---|---|
| “zebra in a video” | opens the clip at the moment the zebra shows up |
| “where they talk about sleep” | that minute of a podcast |
| “the clause about pets in the lease” | the PDF page |
| “a dog on the beach” | the photo |
| “payment declined error” | the screenshot |
| “code: retry a failed call with backoff” | the function, whatever it’s called |
| “code: refreshAccessToken” | the line that defines it, not the places that call it |
| “code: plot how many examples each class has” | the notebook cell |
Meaning and exact words
DigUp compares your words against vectors in a shared 768-dimensional space and gives exact-word matches a boost because an embedding does not hold an invoice number exactly. Text that is mostly numbers, like a data export, is matched by its exact text only.
On a Mac, exact matching includes the text inside screenshots, and since Mac release 0.6.1 scanned PDF pages are read with text recognition too (issue #32). On Windows and Linux (0.7.0-beta.1), the text inside screenshots is not read yet, so a screenshot is found by what it shows rather than by an exact code typed into the search.
Mac release 0.6.1 also fixed a bug where a word found in your files only as the start of a longer word, such as “Grok” in “Grok4”, showed while you typed and then disappeared after you stopped typing (issue #40).
Searching across languages
EmbeddingGemma 2 understands more than 100 languages. A search in English can find a note written in Bengali, Arabic, or another language, and the other way around. DigUp’s evals cover only English, Bengali, and Arabic, and Google notes that the model is not equally strong in every language. See cross-language search for details.
Search limits to know
- Languages without spaces: Languages written without spaces, like Chinese, Japanese, and Thai, are not split into words for exact-word matching, though searching by meaning works for them, as noted in the README and by the maintainer in issue #4 (closed 2026-10-12).
- Screenshot OCR languages: Text inside screenshots is read only on a Mac by Apple’s text recognition, which knows about 25 languages; the maintainer notes in issue #4 that Bengali is not one of them, though the picture itself still matches.
- Input methods on a Mac: Mac 0.6.1 fixed an issue where typing with an input method that composes text (Korean, Japanese, Chinese) broke into loose letters in the search field (issue #13).
- No file-name-only filter: DigUp matches file names together with file contents and has no option to search by file name alone today; a prefix such as
name:is an open feature request as of 2026-10-16 (issue #66). - Code prefix requirement: Starting a query with
code:works only after you turn on code search in Settings → Code or during setup.
If your searches return nothing at all, check supported file types and no results or zero files indexed.
Keyboard shortcuts in results
See how to use DigUp for full setup and viewer details.
| Mac | Windows and Linux | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| ↓ ↑ | ↓ ↑ | Moves through the results |
| ↩ | Enter | Opens the result: PDFs at the page, recordings and videos at the moment, code in your editor at the line |
| Space | Space | A big preview, at the page or moment (once you’ve moved to a result) |
| ⌘↩ | Ctrl+Enter | Shows it in Finder, Explorer or your file manager |
| ⌘C | Ctrl+C (in the window) | Copies the file, to paste anywhere |
| ⌘O | Ctrl+O | The same search in a bigger window, with a picture grid and filters |