5 ms·
I understand the desire to disable Siri system-wide, but Spotlight? How else are you going to find your files? I'm often annoyed how slow/unreliable Spotlight
by kruuuder 9mo ago
I understand the desire to disable Siri system-wide, but Spotlight? How else are you going to find your files?
I'm often annoyed how slow/unreliable Spotlight is, especially in Mail, but what's the alternative here?
- 1718627440 9mo agomacOS is POSIX compatible, so find(1) ?
- azinman2 9mo agoWhy would you want to disable an index in favor of an O(N) search?
- 1718627440 9mo agoThat might be true in theory, but in practice a find oneliner is still the fastest way to find things. It shouldn't be the case, but a fulltext search is faster than using the OS index, because the former is stable and improved for decades by low level developers, while the later is continuously recreated by people who like Javascript in the UI libraries of the OS.
- mixmastamyk 9mo agoBecause the index generator is broken and constantly using up CPU and memory to index things you'll never look for? I mean, it shouldn't be that way, but unfortunately is. I personally disable these kinds of search indexes in favor of find and ag/ripgrep etc. They are very fast on a modern system with SSD. Not available to regular folks I guess, but use prewritten aliases to simplify.
- pavel_lishin 9mo agoOr `locate`, or mostly remembering where files live?
- 1718627440 9mo ago> Never in the past decade have I thought to myself, "gawrsh, I wonder where this file is on my laptop hard drive." I do, but 80% of the time I'm able to locate it by opening the directory where I would put it. And 10% it's in the "other" directory. And since I have the shell history, in the remaining case it is still a simple search.
- josephg 9mo agoI search for stuff all the time. But full disk search just never seems to solve the problems I have. Whatever keyword I’m looking for will inevitably show up in thousands of unrelated header files, Python files and JavaScript files in various node_modules directories and whatnot. Search in finder (or spotlight) is always way too noisy to actually do what I want it to do. Spending hours of cpu time to build that a useless index is deeply disrespectful.
- 1718627440 9mo agoThe typical find oneliner to do a fulltext search invokes sed. sed supports regular expressions, so you can do quite a bit more than just a simple text match. And you can also invoke various filter chains on the results.
- striking 9mo agoRaycast is lovely for opening up applications, at least.
- PrairieFire 9mo agoChallenge with trying to use Raycast more broadly in lieu of Spotlight for systemwide search is Raycast appears to be built on top of the spotlight indexes (mds mdworker)
- striking 9mo agoOh, I thought they had their own index. My bad.
- t-sauer 9mo agoDoesn't Raycast (and all the other popular alternatives) build on top of the Spotlight system?
- PrairieFire 9mo agoI’m not a turn spotlight off guy but it is a bit of a pig in terms of apple’s approaches to system crawling and indexing and how it leaves its metadata detritus all over the disk. I can see the desire to disable it for some.
- ekropotin 9mo agoAlfred/Raycast
- t-sauer 9mo agoBoth are built on top of the Spotlight index.
- vosper 9mo agoSpotlight is much improved in Tahoe - faster and with better results.
- cormorant 9mo agoMany people are experiencing the opposite.
- hbn 9mo agoI was hopeful that they'd finally give us something to make Alfred unnecessary but it's still slow as shit, so I'm still using Alfred. I essentially use it as an app switcher. Sometimes I'm jumping between 6 different apps across multiple monitors and multiple workspaces on each and it's faster do type the first couple letters of the app I want and hit return than to Cmd+Tab, parse the icons in their unpredictable order (made harder by all icons being squircles now), and tab to which one I want. But native spotlight is too slow and unpredictable.
- lizardking 9mo agoSeems worse and slower for me. YMMV
- zapzupnz 9mo agoFaster and better, but in all its time, it's never gotten better than Alfred which, ironically, depends on the Spotlight index.
- mikkupikku 9mo agoPersonally I store a list of my files, with tags, in a sqlite database. Granted, I have a lot of custom tooling to make that practical..
- pfortuny 9mo agoI use Quicksilver and I have Spotlight disabled.
- analogpixel 9mo agoStore your files in a file structure that makes sense so you know where things are? I have never used Spotlight to find a file because I put files in sensible places.
- giantrobot 9mo agoI use Spotlight all the time to search for the contents of files. I don't memorize the contents and names of every file on my system, that's what my computer is for.
- analogpixel 9mo agothis is what grep is for. Why do I need a service constantly indexing my system and wasting resources for the few times a month I might need to run grep <string>? what problem was really solved here?
- zapzupnz 9mo agoDoes grep work on anything other than plain text? And then you'll have to wait for grep to trawl every folder to find the right file rather than consult an optimised index.
- giantrobot 9mo agoAh yes, grep's famous support of PDF and Office documents will surely come in handy. As will its image OCR capabilities. Oh it doesn't have those things so is a non-option. Tahoe in general sucks but Spotlight has been a pretty good local search for nearly twenty years. The image OCR added in Sonoma made it even more useful.
- josephg 9mo agoI want spotlight to open applications and system settings. But full disk indexing makes spotlight basically useless for that, because its index is filled with crap. Instead of opening zed I accidentally open some random header file that’s sitting around in Xcode. It’s worse than useless. And that says nothing of the grotesque amount of cpu time spotlight wants to spend indexing all my files. A feature I never wanted has ruined a feature I do want. It’s a complete own goal. In frustration I turned spotlight off completely a few months ago. Rip.
- CafeRacer 9mo agoId disable half - if not more - of default services. Thats why my next laptop will be linux. Apple is not there yet, but kind of drifting towards becoming the new windows.
- layer8 9mo agoWindows at least lets you disable any service you want.
- hu3 9mo agoAnd I can tell Windows search to not index some directories. Like node_module with a million small files I don't want to search in anyway except with grep. Perhaps if macs let you configure Spotlight to ignore some directories you could tell it to ignore the entire disk? Which would disable it in practical terms.
- thisislife2 9mo agoNot a fan of Spotlight here too. But, you certainly can instruct Spotlight to ignore some directory or drive through System Preferences > Spotlight and selecting the Privacy tab in it which allows you to add the directory or drive that you want Spotlight to not index.
- hu3 9mo agogreat to know thanks