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Does anyone have recommendations for a Spotlight replacement (that doesn’t use spotlight under the hood)? Different but related issue: Spotlight breaks for me

Does anyone have recommendations for a Spotlight replacement (that doesn’t use spotlight under the hood)? Different but related issue: Spotlight breaks for me constantly (there’s a corrupted file somewhere in the TBs and while it breaks the index, the logs are an unhelpful firehose). Last time I looked, all the replacements were just using the Spotlight index. Sounds like it’s time for the community to show how bloated and restrictive Spotlight has become.

rcarmo 4y ago
The community can't really match what Spotlight can do under the hood, I'm afraid. There is a huge amount of engineering effort that went into the indexing, data extraction and filesystem integrations that you can't just go and reimplement from scratch. Regardless, I went and filed feedback #FB11980196 today, in the hope that Apple actually looks at these things (but I've been around since the Radar days, so I have little hope).
- joshspankit 4y ago
  No I’m sure that no one can match what Spotlight does under the hood (I assume most of the necessary APIs are locked down), however I and many others could replace spotlight with something that goes oldschool: search folder/filenames. It would allow us to launch applications quickly, open calendar if we need to search for an event, open contacts if we need to search for contact info, and find files that we’ve saved to the local disk. Bonus points if it also does math and currency conversion, but at least for me: entirely optional.
  - rcarmo 4y ago
    There are a dozen such things from days gone by: QuickSilver, LaunchBar, Alfred…
    - joshspankit 4y ago
      I wrote that comment partially because Alfred uses Spotlight under the hood. I may be wrong, but when I installed Alfred and disabled Spotlight entirely I could not get Alfred to index applications or files on-disk. Thanks for the reminder about Quicksilver. For some reason I thought it was no longer active and I’m glad to be wrong.

rcarmo 4y ago

The community can't really match what Spotlight can do under the hood, I'm afraid. There is a huge amount of engineering effort that went into the indexing, data extraction and filesystem integrations that you can't just go and reimplement from scratch. Regardless, I went and filed feedback #FB11980196 today, in the hope that Apple actually looks at these things (but I've been around since the Radar days, so I have little hope).

joshspankit 4y ago
No I’m sure that no one can match what Spotlight does under the hood (I assume most of the necessary APIs are locked down), however I and many others could replace spotlight with something that goes oldschool: search folder/filenames. It would allow us to launch applications quickly, open calendar if we need to search for an event, open contacts if we need to search for contact info, and find files that we’ve saved to the local disk. Bonus points if it also does math and currency conversion, but at least for me: entirely optional.
- rcarmo 4y ago
  There are a dozen such things from days gone by: QuickSilver, LaunchBar, Alfred…
  - joshspankit 4y ago
    I wrote that comment partially because Alfred uses Spotlight under the hood. I may be wrong, but when I installed Alfred and disabled Spotlight entirely I could not get Alfred to index applications or files on-disk. Thanks for the reminder about Quicksilver. For some reason I thought it was no longer active and I’m glad to be wrong.