4 ms·

and if it paid off, that would almost be acceptable! But no. After spotlight has indexed my /Applications folder, when I hit command-spacebar and type "preview.

and if it paid off, that would almost be acceptable! But no. After spotlight has indexed my /Applications folder, when I hit command-spacebar and type "preview.app", it takes ~4 seconds on my M4 laptop to search the sqlite database for it and return that entry. grumble

admissionsguy 9mo ago
TIL there is a search bar triggered by CMD+Space. After 15 long years.
- rngfnby 9mo ago
  Too late. Apple has destroyed it. I just got my first ARM Mac to replace my work Win machine (what has MS done to Windows!?!? :'() Used to be I could type "display" and Id get right to display settings in settings. Now it shows thousands of useless links to who knows what. Instead I have to type "settings" and then, within settings, type "display" Still better than the Windows shit show. Honestly, a well setup Linux machine has better user experience than anything on the market today.
  - chaostheory 9mo ago
    > a well setup Linux machine has better user experience than anything on the market today We probably have to preface that with “for older people”. IMO Linux has changed less UX wise than either Windows or MacOS in recent years
    - ff2400t 9mo ago
      Because of Linux's Fragmentation there are so many different UI being created right now and so much more experimentation. There is KDE with endless customization, Gnome for the people who are okay with a more opinionated UI, Cosmic the completely new Desktop Environment and of course the good old lxde. I have to use Windows at work these day and every single one of these makes the Windows feel like it's more suited for Old People because of how slow it can be.
      - chaostheory 9mo ago
        Yes but most people just fire up the distro, UI, and settings that they’re most comfortable with for their daily driver. People can and often keep things the same
        ff2400t 9mo ago
        Yeah, i am one of those people who uses vanilla gnome with 2 or 3 extension. My reply was for the to the comment which said linux ux hasn't changed and it's for Old people. Vanilla gnome the default desktop on Ubuntu and Fedora is such a huge departure from standard Desktop UX.
      - tempest_ 9mo ago
        Does KDE have endless customization? I just installed Plasma with Endevouros and use it. I used Cinnamon before it. They don't require much effort.
    - adrian_b 9mo ago
      Even if the degradation of the user interfaces is noticed especially by older people, I doubt that this has anything to do with them being old and I believe that it is caused only by them being more experienced, i.e. having seen more alternatives for user interfaces. For several decades, I have used hundreds of different computers, from IBM mainframes, DEC minicomputers and early PCs with Intel 8080 or Motorola MC6800 until the latest computers with AMD Zen 5 or Intel Arrow Lake. I have used a variety of operating systems and user interfaces. During the first decades, there has been a continuous and obvious improvement in user interfaces, so I never had any hesitation to switch to a new program with a completely different user interface for the same application, even every year or every few months, whenever such a change resulted in better results and productivity. Nevertheless, an optimum seems to have been reached around 20 years ago, and since then more often than not I see only worse interfaces that make harder to do what was simpler previously, so there is no incentive for an "upgrade". Therefore I indeed customize my GUIs in Linux to a mode that resembles much more older Windows or MacOS than their recent versions and which prioritizes instant responses and minimum distractions over the coolest look. In the rare occasions when I find a program that does something in a better way than what I am using, I still switch immediately to it, no matter how different it may be in comparison with what I am familiar, so conservatism has nothing to do with preferring the older GUIs.
      - chaostheory 9mo ago
        I believe it’s more about familiarity and being more resistant to change both good and bad
      - pwg 9mo ago
        > Nevertheless, an optimum seems to have been reached around 20 years ago, and since then more often than not I see only worse interfaces that make harder A consequence of having "UI designers" paid on salary instead of individual contract jobs that expire when the specific fix is complete. In order to preserve their continuing salary, the UI designers have to continue making changes for changes sake (so that the accounting dept. does not begin asking: "why are we paying salary for all these UI designers if they are not creating any output"). So combining reaching an optimum 20 years ago with the fact that the UI designers must make changes for the sake of change, results in the changes being sub-optimal.
  - deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]
  - pxoe 9mo ago
    >windows shit show And yet on Windows 11, hit Win key, type display, it immediately shows display settings as the first result.
    - maccard 9mo ago
      Unless it decides to update your search results to search for “Display” with bing in Edge, despite edge not being my browser.
    - rngfnby 9mo ago
      [dead]
    - elcritch 9mo ago
      Followed by 5 ads and a link to use copilot! ;)
- UqWBcuFx6NV4r 9mo ago
  Despite what the sibling comment says, my anecdata is that cmd+space works perfectly fine. People are really unable to differentiate “I am having issues” and “things are universally or even widely broken”
  - cpuguy83 9mo ago
    Or, and bear with me hear, there is a problem even if you aren't experiencing it. I've been using spotlight since it was introduced for... everything. In Tahoe it has been absolutely terrible. Unusable. Always indexing. Never showing me applications which is the main thing I use it for (yes, it is configured to show applications!). They broke something.
  - admissionsguy 9mo ago
    for the record, my newish mac shows the display settings fine when i type display
tambourine_man 9mo ago
I may be a spotlight unicorn, but I’ve never seen this behavior people complain about. Spotlight has always been instant for me, since its introduction and I’ve never seen a regression. It is completely useless on network mounts, however, where I resort to find/grep/rg
etrvic 9mo ago
On my Intel mac searching with cmd+space for a file takes under a second. Maybe there is a problem on your end?
- ricardobeat 9mo ago
  I’ve actually had worse problems as recently as last week: Apps stopped showing up completely in spotlight. Only a system reinstall + manually deleting all index files fixed it. Meanwhile it was eating 20-30GB of disk space. There are tons of reports of this in the apple forums. Even then, it feels a lot slower in MacOS 26 than it did before, and you often get the rug-pull effect of your results changing a millisecond before you press the enter key. I would pay good money to go back to Snow Leopard.
  - etrvic 9mo ago
    I had the same problem last year, re-indexing all the files fixed it for me[1]. That being said, macOS was definitely more snappy back on Catalina, which was the first version I had so I can't vouch for Snow Leopard. Each update after Catalina felt gradually worse and from what i heard Tahoe feels like the last nail in the coffin. I hope the UX team will deliver a more polished, expressive and minimal design next time. [1] - https://support.apple.com/en-us/102321 https://support.apple.com/en-us/102321
    - samtheprogram 9mo ago
      Catalina and Mojave were the closest releases in terms of quality that we got to Snow Leopard. Catalina in particular since it was the release that removed more 32-bit cruft (like Snow Leopard before it).
- fragmede 9mo ago
  Absolutely there's a problem on my end, but how do I fix it! How did it get to that state in the first place? How do I make it not come back?
throw234232t3 9mo ago
On pre-Tahoe macOS there is the “Applications” view (accessible e.g. from the dock). Since the only thing I would use Spotlight for is searching through applications to start, I changed the Cmd+Space keybind to launch the Applications view. The search is instant. Spotlight, aside from failing to find applications also pollutes the search results with random files it found on the filesystem, some shortcuts to search the web and whatnot. Also, at the start of me using a Mac it repeatedly got into the state of not displaying any results whatsoever. Fixing that each time required running some arcane commands in the terminal. Something that people associate with Linux, but ironically I think now Linux requires less of that than Mac. But in Tahoe they removed the Applications view, so my solution is gone now. All in all, with Apple destroying macOS in each release, crippling DTrace with SIP, Liquid Glass, poor performance monitoring compared to what I can see with tools like perf on Linux, or Intel VTune on Windows, Metal slowly becoming the only GPU programming option, I think I’m going to be switching back to Linux.
- saagarjha 9mo ago
  macOS profiling tools completely blow Linux’s perf out of the water. It’s not even close.
  - krior 9mo ago
    You are saying that like perf is Linux only profiling tool.
    - saagarjha 9mo ago
      That’s what they compared to
  - throw234232t3 9mo ago
    [dead]
    - saagarjha 9mo ago
      It’s a condemnation of how bad perf is if it loses to that.
littlecranky67 9mo ago
I have the same issue on my M4 Macbook Pro and I had it on my previous M2 Apple Mac Mini, on several macOS versions (pre-Tahoe). I suspect it has to do with the virtual filesystem layer, as I had used OneDrive for Mac and now Proton Drive. Whatever it is, it has been broken for years on several devices and OSes and I am pretty sure Apple doesn't care about it.
steveBK123 9mo ago
It feels like the 2000s era of “Mac software is better but you have to tolerate their hardware to enjoy it” has inverted in the last 5 years. Incredible hardware down to in-house silicon, but software that would have given Steve Jobs a stroke. Firstly performance issues like wtf is going on with search. Then there seems to be a need to constantly futz with stable established apps UXes every annual OS update for the sake of change. Moving buttons, adding clicks to workflows, etc. My most recent enraging find was the date picker in the reminders app. When editting a reminder, there is an up/down arrow interface to the side of the date, but if you click them they change the MONTH. Who decided that makes any sense. In what world is bumping a reminder by a month the most common change? It’s actually worse than useless, its actively net negative.
irae 9mo ago
I've never had this issue. M1 Max. But I also disable some of the Spotlight indexes. Cmmd+Space has no files for me, when I know I am searching for a file I use Finder search instead.

admissionsguy 9mo ago

TIL there is a search bar triggered by CMD+Space. After 15 long years.

rngfnby 9mo ago
Too late. Apple has destroyed it. I just got my first ARM Mac to replace my work Win machine (what has MS done to Windows!?!? :'() Used to be I could type "display" and Id get right to display settings in settings. Now it shows thousands of useless links to who knows what. Instead I have to type "settings" and then, within settings, type "display" Still better than the Windows shit show. Honestly, a well setup Linux machine has better user experience than anything on the market today.
- chaostheory 9mo ago
  > a well setup Linux machine has better user experience than anything on the market today We probably have to preface that with “for older people”. IMO Linux has changed less UX wise than either Windows or MacOS in recent years
  - ff2400t 9mo ago
    Because of Linux's Fragmentation there are so many different UI being created right now and so much more experimentation. There is KDE with endless customization, Gnome for the people who are okay with a more opinionated UI, Cosmic the completely new Desktop Environment and of course the good old lxde. I have to use Windows at work these day and every single one of these makes the Windows feel like it's more suited for Old People because of how slow it can be.
    - chaostheory 9mo ago
      Yes but most people just fire up the distro, UI, and settings that they’re most comfortable with for their daily driver. People can and often keep things the same
      - ff2400t 9mo ago
        Yeah, i am one of those people who uses vanilla gnome with 2 or 3 extension. My reply was for the to the comment which said linux ux hasn't changed and it's for Old people. Vanilla gnome the default desktop on Ubuntu and Fedora is such a huge departure from standard Desktop UX.
    - tempest_ 9mo ago
      Does KDE have endless customization? I just installed Plasma with Endevouros and use it. I used Cinnamon before it. They don't require much effort.
  - adrian_b 9mo ago
    Even if the degradation of the user interfaces is noticed especially by older people, I doubt that this has anything to do with them being old and I believe that it is caused only by them being more experienced, i.e. having seen more alternatives for user interfaces. For several decades, I have used hundreds of different computers, from IBM mainframes, DEC minicomputers and early PCs with Intel 8080 or Motorola MC6800 until the latest computers with AMD Zen 5 or Intel Arrow Lake. I have used a variety of operating systems and user interfaces. During the first decades, there has been a continuous and obvious improvement in user interfaces, so I never had any hesitation to switch to a new program with a completely different user interface for the same application, even every year or every few months, whenever such a change resulted in better results and productivity. Nevertheless, an optimum seems to have been reached around 20 years ago, and since then more often than not I see only worse interfaces that make harder to do what was simpler previously, so there is no incentive for an "upgrade". Therefore I indeed customize my GUIs in Linux to a mode that resembles much more older Windows or MacOS than their recent versions and which prioritizes instant responses and minimum distractions over the coolest look. In the rare occasions when I find a program that does something in a better way than what I am using, I still switch immediately to it, no matter how different it may be in comparison with what I am familiar, so conservatism has nothing to do with preferring the older GUIs.
    - chaostheory 9mo ago
      I believe it’s more about familiarity and being more resistant to change both good and bad
    - pwg 9mo ago
      > Nevertheless, an optimum seems to have been reached around 20 years ago, and since then more often than not I see only worse interfaces that make harder A consequence of having "UI designers" paid on salary instead of individual contract jobs that expire when the specific fix is complete. In order to preserve their continuing salary, the UI designers have to continue making changes for changes sake (so that the accounting dept. does not begin asking: "why are we paying salary for all these UI designers if they are not creating any output"). So combining reaching an optimum 20 years ago with the fact that the UI designers must make changes for the sake of change, results in the changes being sub-optimal.
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
- pxoe 9mo ago
  >windows shit show And yet on Windows 11, hit Win key, type display, it immediately shows display settings as the first result.
  - maccard 9mo ago
    Unless it decides to update your search results to search for “Display” with bing in Edge, despite edge not being my browser.
  - rngfnby 9mo ago
    [dead]
  - elcritch 9mo ago
    Followed by 5 ads and a link to use copilot! ;)
UqWBcuFx6NV4r 9mo ago
Despite what the sibling comment says, my anecdata is that cmd+space works perfectly fine. People are really unable to differentiate “I am having issues” and “things are universally or even widely broken”
- cpuguy83 9mo ago
  Or, and bear with me hear, there is a problem even if you aren't experiencing it. I've been using spotlight since it was introduced for... everything. In Tahoe it has been absolutely terrible. Unusable. Always indexing. Never showing me applications which is the main thing I use it for (yes, it is configured to show applications!). They broke something.
- admissionsguy 9mo ago
  for the record, my newish mac shows the display settings fine when i type display

tambourine_man 9mo ago

I may be a spotlight unicorn, but I’ve never seen this behavior people complain about. Spotlight has always been instant for me, since its introduction and I’ve never seen a regression. It is completely useless on network mounts, however, where I resort to find/grep/rg

etrvic 9mo ago

On my Intel mac searching with cmd+space for a file takes under a second. Maybe there is a problem on your end?

ricardobeat 9mo ago
I’ve actually had worse problems as recently as last week: Apps stopped showing up completely in spotlight. Only a system reinstall + manually deleting all index files fixed it. Meanwhile it was eating 20-30GB of disk space. There are tons of reports of this in the apple forums. Even then, it feels a lot slower in MacOS 26 than it did before, and you often get the rug-pull effect of your results changing a millisecond before you press the enter key. I would pay good money to go back to Snow Leopard.
- etrvic 9mo ago
  I had the same problem last year, re-indexing all the files fixed it for me[1]. That being said, macOS was definitely more snappy back on Catalina, which was the first version I had so I can't vouch for Snow Leopard. Each update after Catalina felt gradually worse and from what i heard Tahoe feels like the last nail in the coffin. I hope the UX team will deliver a more polished, expressive and minimal design next time. [1] - https://support.apple.com/en-us/102321 https://support.apple.com/en-us/102321
  - samtheprogram 9mo ago
    Catalina and Mojave were the closest releases in terms of quality that we got to Snow Leopard. Catalina in particular since it was the release that removed more 32-bit cruft (like Snow Leopard before it).
fragmede 9mo ago
Absolutely there's a problem on my end, but how do I fix it! How did it get to that state in the first place? How do I make it not come back?

throw234232t3 9mo ago

On pre-Tahoe macOS there is the “Applications” view (accessible e.g. from the dock). Since the only thing I would use Spotlight for is searching through applications to start, I changed the Cmd+Space keybind to launch the Applications view. The search is instant. Spotlight, aside from failing to find applications also pollutes the search results with random files it found on the filesystem, some shortcuts to search the web and whatnot. Also, at the start of me using a Mac it repeatedly got into the state of not displaying any results whatsoever. Fixing that each time required running some arcane commands in the terminal. Something that people associate with Linux, but ironically I think now Linux requires less of that than Mac. But in Tahoe they removed the Applications view, so my solution is gone now. All in all, with Apple destroying macOS in each release, crippling DTrace with SIP, Liquid Glass, poor performance monitoring compared to what I can see with tools like perf on Linux, or Intel VTune on Windows, Metal slowly becoming the only GPU programming option, I think I’m going to be switching back to Linux.

saagarjha 9mo ago
macOS profiling tools completely blow Linux’s perf out of the water. It’s not even close.
- krior 9mo ago
  You are saying that like perf is Linux only profiling tool.
  - saagarjha 9mo ago
    That’s what they compared to
- throw234232t3 9mo ago
  [dead]
  - saagarjha 9mo ago
    It’s a condemnation of how bad perf is if it loses to that.

littlecranky67 9mo ago

I have the same issue on my M4 Macbook Pro and I had it on my previous M2 Apple Mac Mini, on several macOS versions (pre-Tahoe). I suspect it has to do with the virtual filesystem layer, as I had used OneDrive for Mac and now Proton Drive. Whatever it is, it has been broken for years on several devices and OSes and I am pretty sure Apple doesn't care about it.

steveBK123 9mo ago

It feels like the 2000s era of “Mac software is better but you have to tolerate their hardware to enjoy it” has inverted in the last 5 years. Incredible hardware down to in-house silicon, but software that would have given Steve Jobs a stroke. Firstly performance issues like wtf is going on with search. Then there seems to be a need to constantly futz with stable established apps UXes every annual OS update for the sake of change. Moving buttons, adding clicks to workflows, etc. My most recent enraging find was the date picker in the reminders app. When editting a reminder, there is an up/down arrow interface to the side of the date, but if you click them they change the MONTH. Who decided that makes any sense. In what world is bumping a reminder by a month the most common change? It’s actually worse than useless, its actively net negative.

irae 9mo ago

I've never had this issue. M1 Max. But I also disable some of the Spotlight indexes. Cmmd+Space has no files for me, when I know I am searching for a file I use Finder search instead.