• The indexing progress no longer reads “0%” while it works through a large library. It was at 0.8% — not nothing, but it rounds to nothing. It shows the counts instead: “Indexing 483 of 60,374”.

Last time, on bHive…

Away since 2.1? The short version.

• Searching a Hive now searches the Hives inside it. A Hive whose job is to hold other Hives has no files of its own, so searching inside one used to find nothing at all. (2.3)
• The search field says where it is looking, and offers the whole library when a search inside one Hive comes back thin. (2.3)
• A hit in a scan or a comic opens on the page it matched on. It used to drop you on page 1 and wish you luck. (2.3)
• Indexing no longer downloads cloud files that aren’t on your Mac. (2.3)
• Icon and Gallery show what your files look like, with optional size and item counts. (2.3)
• Search results are no longer replaced by your whole library mid-search, and clicking one goes to the match. (2.2.1)
• bHive reads comics, Office files, notebooks, code and every image format your Mac can open, plus subtitles and archive listings. (2.2)
• MKV, WebM and AVI play, with J/K/L shuttle and sound at every speed, including backwards. (2.2)
• Full Screen Preview (⇧⌘F), and every view setting in one toolbar button. (2.2)
• It opens in about a second on a 63,000-file library. It used to take ten. (2.2)
• Every source in an answer says whether it can still be trusted, and clicking one lands on it in your library. (2.1)
• Suggest Tags… and Group into Hives… — bHive proposes, you decide, one undo takes it back. (2.1)
• Search explains itself, and takes "quotes", +word and -word. (2.1)

Search finds what's inside your Hives, and a result takes you to the exact page it matched on.

Searching a Hive now searches everything inside it

• A Hive that holds other Hives used to find nothing. Searching looked only at the files sitting directly in the Hive you had selected — so if you organise a big collection into sub-Hives, that Hive held no files of its own and every search inside it came back empty. It searches the whole Hive now, sub-Hives and all, the way searching a folder in the Finder does.
• The search field says what it will search — “Search All Files”, or “Search Photos” when a Hive is selected — so it's never a mystery which part of your library you're looking at.
• And when a search inside a Hive comes up short, bHive offers to look through all your files instead, right there in the status bar.

Results take you to the page

• A hit in a scanned document or a comic opens on the page it matched on. These are pictures of text: bHive reads them so you can search them, but there's nothing in the page itself to highlight, so a result used to land you on page 1 and leave you to find it. bHive now remembers which page each piece of text came from and takes you straight there.
• This applies to documents bHive reads from now on. Files already in your library pick it up as they're read again.

Your files stay where you put them

• Indexing no longer downloads cloud files that aren't on your Mac. If iCloud Drive, Dropbox, Google Drive or OneDrive had freed up space by removing a file's contents, simply indexing it used to pull the whole thing back down. bHive now recognises those files without touching them, and lists them as waiting rather than fetching gigabytes you didn't ask for.

Icon and Gallery views show your files

• Show icon previews (on, as in the Finder) draws what each file actually looks like instead of a generic badge — so a folder of photographs looks like photographs.
• Show item info (off by default) adds a file's size, or a Hive's item count, under its name.
• Both live in View Options, per view.

Indexing tells the truth, and finishes what it starts

• Turning on “OCR comic pages” survives quitting bHive. Reading the lettering on a big collection takes hours; quitting halfway used to quietly drop whatever was left, with nothing recording that it was still owed. It picks up where it left off now — including after your Mac sleeps.
• The status bar says what's still waiting and why, instead of a number that could climb while the work went down.
• Sleeping your Mac mid-scan no longer leaves a half-read file behind. Time limits now measure work done rather than time passed, so a nap between pages can't cut a document short.

Smaller things

• Scrolling over a video no longer scrubs it. Two fingers on the trackpad used to run the playhead through the clip.
• Searching a large Hive is fast again — a search that had to look through 60,000 files now finishes in a fraction of a second.
• The folder-access permission dialogs macOS shows now say bHive, not the old name.

Search results stay put, and clicking one takes you to what matched.

• Search results no longer get replaced by your whole library. On a large library, the work bHive does as it starts up could land a moment after your search and quietly put every file back in the list — so the results you were looking at turned into everything you own.
• Clicking a result goes to the match. If your words are in the document, the preview jumps to the first one and you can step through the rest, as before. If the file came up because it's close in meaning to what you typed, the preview now jumps to the passage that actually matched, rather than sitting on page 1.
• Results that matched by meaning are marked with a small ≈ after the name, in List, Icon and Gallery views — so you can tell at a glance which results contain your words and which are near them. (The marker was there in code but drew nothing.)
• When there's nothing to jump to, bHive says why. Scanned pages, comics and audio or video transcripts are searchable because bHive read the text — but that text isn't part of the page itself, so there's nothing to highlight. The preview now tells you that instead of looking broken.

If you're coming from 2.1, here's everything 2.2 brought:

What's new in 2.2

bHive reads far more of your library, opens almost anything without leaving the window, and starts up instantly.

Comics, and a lot more file types

• Comic books. .cbz and .cbr show their cover, page through like any other document, and any ComicInfo details inside them are searchable. Turn on Settings ▸ Index ▸ OCR comic pages to read the lettering on every page too.
• Office and notebooks. PowerPoint (.pptx) slides and speaker notes, Excel (.xlsx) sheets, OpenDocument, and Jupyter notebooks are read and searchable.
• Code and config. Anything your Mac calls source code or plain text — .swift, .py, .js, .go, .sh, .toml, .plist and hundreds more.
• Every image format your Mac can open, including all camera RAW files, WebP, AVIF, HEIF, JPEG 2000, PSD and ICO — plus SVG, whose text is real text.
• Subtitles (.srt, .vtt, .itt, .ttml) and archive listings (.zip, .tar, .7z, .rar — the file list, never the contents).
• Files an older bHive gave up on are re-read automatically the first time you launch this version, so a library full of comics or spreadsheets becomes searchable without you doing anything.

Video and audio play in bHive

• MKV, WebM and AVI play — formats macOS can't open on its own. bHive converts them once, in the background, and remembers the result.
• J / K / L shuttle, as in Final Cut and Resolve: K plays and pauses, L goes forward and J back, and each further press steps 2×, 4×, 8×, 16×. The sound stays on at every speed, including in reverse.

Full Screen Preview

• ⇧⌘F fills the screen with the selected file. Arrow keys turn pages, Esc comes back, and the caption fades away after a few seconds so nothing sits over the page.

View Options

• One toolbar button opens View Options: the view picker, then only the settings that apply to the view you're in — size, sort, columns, row colors, text size. The old view picker and a scattering of Settings toggles are gone.
• Show Hidden Files is now ⇧⌘. in the View menu, exactly as in the Finder.
• The sidebar, preview and Info panes each have a button in the status bar, and open and close instantly.

Speed

• bHive opens in about a second on a 63,000-file library — it used to take ten, with the file list and sidebar filling in afterwards. Everything now arrives with the window.
• Dragging in a big folder no longer freezes the app. A 62,000-file folder imports in the background with a running count in the status bar.

Search

• Files whose name matches come first — the whole phrase at the very top — ahead of files that merely mention your words somewhere inside. Searching for a file name now finds that file.

Fixes

• Dragging in several folders at once, or a folder together with a large selection of files, no longer quietly skips everything after the first.
• Files dropped into a Hive land in that Hive, even if you click elsewhere while a large import finishes.
• Dropping an audio file could crash bHive on libraries with many folders. Fixed.
• Long text in the search field scrolls instead of running out of sight under the cancel button.
• Search results now show in Columns view.
• HTML pages preview as pages again, and text files in older encodings display correctly.
• A drive plugged in after bHive is running is watched for changes again.

Polish and fixes for the 1.3 additions.

Images & preview

• Zoom fixed. Zooming an image now scales smoothly and stays centered, for every image type. Previously some JPEGs and PNGs wouldn't zoom out, or the image drifted to a corner instead of growing from the middle.
• Steady preview. The preview no longer blanks out for a moment right when indexing finishes.
• The zoom slider now sits on the right of the preview header, clear of the Live Text controls.

Trash

• In-Trash flag. A file whose original sits in the Trash is now marked with a red trash badge in every view, plus an "In Trash" label in the preview header — a heads-up before an emptied Trash takes it for good.
• Move to Trash is now consistently part of Linked Hives. With that feature off (the default), bHive Filer never offers to delete your originals — not in the menu, the right-click menu, or with the keyboard.

Also

• New libraries start with a starter Hive called Bait Hive, ready to fill, rename, or delete.
• Removed the floating icon-size slider in Icon view; resize with ⌘+ and ⌘-, or set a default in Settings ▸ Appearance.
• Re-indexing a file now keeps its identity, so favorites and the current selection stay put.

Read more comfortably, search your pictures, pull text off any image, and keep private notes — all still fully offline.

Preview

• Two-page spread. Read PDFs and books like an open book, two pages at a time. Turn pages with the on-screen arrows or the ← → keys.
• Live Text on images. Select and copy text straight off any picture — screenshots, signs, receipts, scanned pages. Links and phone numbers become clickable, and QR codes and barcodes are recognized too. It works at any zoom.

Search

• Find similar images. Right-click any picture and choose Find Similar Images — bHive Filer sorts your library by visual resemblance to it, entirely on this Mac.
• Much faster indexing. Adding and refreshing your library is dramatically quicker now, so big folders finish in a fraction of the time.

Organize

• Notes. Jot a private note on any file, right at the top of the preview. Notes are searchable, so you can find a file by your own words — and there's an optional Notes column in List view.
• Hidden files, your call. bHive Filer hides the same files the Finder hides by default. Turn on Settings ▸ Advanced ▸ Show hidden files to reveal them — it's instant and reversible, and never changes what's indexed.

External drives

• Browse offline. Files you added from an external drive stay in your library after you unplug it — fully browsable and searchable, marked with a small disconnected-drive badge. Reconnect the drive to open the originals.

Also

• Keep your index anywhere local. Store the search index on any local disk, including an external drive; bHive Filer tucks it into a tidy "bHive Filer" folder. Cloud folders stay off-limits, since syncing a live database would corrupt it.
• Safer reset. Resetting bHive Filer to defaults now asks for confirmation first, so it's never a surprise.

A big update: find files faster, see more of what you searched, and make bHive your own.

Search

• Filters right in the search bar. Click the magnifier to narrow a search by file type, where to look, or date — and turn file-name matching on or off.
• Save a search. Keep a search you run often, text and filters together. It lands in the sidebar to run again with one click.
• See why a file matched. Search results now show the passage that matched under the file name, so a surprising hit explains itself instead of being just a name.
• Sharper results. Short or vague searches return far less noise — if a result shows up, there's a clear reason it did.

ePub books

• bHive now reads ePub books — search inside them by meaning and read them right in the preview pane, like PDFs and everything else. Books already in your library become searchable after the next re-index.

Make it yours

• Light or Dark. A new Appearance setting: follow the system, or lock bHive to Light or Dark.
• Preview font. Choose the typeface documents are shown in — the menu previews each font in the font itself.
• Sidebar text size. Small, Medium, or Large, whatever's easiest to read.

See what's indexed

• Settings now shows what bHive is tracking: the folders it's watching, when it last indexed, the size of the index on disk, and any files that hold no searchable text — nothing hidden away in logs.
• A new "How your data is stored" link explains, in plain language, exactly what's kept and where. Everything stays on your Mac.
• The Settings window can be made taller now, like System Settings.

Fixed

• Scrolling the file list. With the preview pane open, the last files in a long list could sit behind it and refuse to scroll into view. Fixed — the whole list scrolls no matter how tall the preview is.
• Right-click menus. The context menu sometimes didn't appear on the second click. It's reliable now.
• New installs couldn't create Hives (fixed in 1.1). On a brand-new install, making a Hive appeared to do nothing — it wouldn't show in the sidebar or the "Add to Hive" menu. This was fixed in 1.1; if you're coming from an earlier build, any Hives you already tried to make reappear on their own after updating.