I hate Spotlight

Whatever is it about?? The minute I start typing it starts searching, so it's looking for just a couple of characters. I'm usually searching BIG servers, which could take 5-10 minutes with the old Sherlock, but Spotlight just can't do it at all. And all this find content stuff - I am looking for files or folders, whyever does it default to this?
Today I tried to search my computer for 'itunes' (I wanted to check whether I had downloaded Apple's sample scripts before). Everything locked up. When I restarted and tried again it found every blessed music track I have. Whyever would I want that?
Sometimes I look back very fondly at OS9....

If you're usually searching BIG servers, you'd probably be better served by using the Cmd-F search window (instead of the menubar icon) and selecting the specific locations that you want to search, excluding servers that you're not intersted in.
As for improving performance, there are a couple of things you can do:
1. Use EasyFind (available on http://www.versiontracker.com) - I use it occasionally, since it's slower, to get around Spotlight limitations, others swear by it.
2. Change the Cmd-F window defaults file
/System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app/Contents/Resources/default_smart.plist
to show name contains and List View (reportedly less beachballing)
3. If it starts searching as soon as you start typing, keep typing. Even if not displayed, the keyboard buffer should fill in your search term and then narrow the results in a single step. Alternatively, you can copy/paste your search term into the search field.
4. Search for something more specific.. Rather than search for iTunes, which should return all files associated with iTunes, search for the extension, or use the Kind:Others... criteria in Cmd-F to search for a specific file type.

Similar Messages

  • Spotlight completely broken even after troubleshooting

    Ok , i must say i HATE Spotlight. I always have, mainly because it never has worked fast enough for me, and has been problematic since day one.
    Having said that I am still forced to use it to find things on my system but now it's completely broken. When I type in the Spotlight window, it hangs even after the first letter, like it usually does, but now it has added a new trick in that it refuses to find anything at all.
    Fine. I'll force OSX to rebuild the database.
    Go into terminal, type in the appropriate command that 100 billion posts in discussion say to do, and I get nothing. It does nothing. No rebuild. Nothing. I check Activity monitor to see if it's working. Nothing. This is also after I've trashed the prefs and Spotlight refuses to even build a new prefs file.
    So, I go to System prefs, open the Spotlight tab, and try to drag my volume to the privacy window to get it to dump the dbase. The volume never shows up. Try adding it using the button. Nothing.
    I trashed the Finder prefs too, and at least that fixed the problem with Finder locking up every time I did a Get Info on a file, but didn't help Spotlight at all.
    One other minor good thing is, once I trashed the Spotlight prefs, at least now my system will reboot in under 5 minutes time, since I'm sure that Spotlight was the cause of that problem as well.
    Dear Apple. Spotlight *****. In the meantime can someone offer other suggestions BESIDES reinstalling Tiger. Thanks.

    Bryan,
    I don't know about you but re-installing the entire OS should only be a desperate last measure. I haven't done it in years, and hope never to have to, since it would require at least a full day of my time, what with finding all the upgrades (on a dialup connection !!!), installing them, and then re- inputting all my data into the various places where it's needed. And yet that's what we now regularly find TIger users advised to do, just because of one dumb thing: Spotlight. And even if you DO go down this route and re-install Tiger, it's a sure bet something will go wrong again with Spotlight anyway.
    ONe of the simplest, quickest things any computer user needs to do is find a file, any file, fast, and then get on with whatever it was they needed the file for. Apple seems to think we find the process so fascinating that we could spend the whole day doing it.
    Try Easyfind instead of Spotlight. It's far from ideal but as things stand with the Mac OS, it's the only way to find your files.
    You can download it from here
    http://www.devon-technologies.com/products/freeware/index.html
    Oh, BTW, did you know that in a desperate attempt to make Spotlight work, Apple decided that it won't index everything?
    I hope Easyfind makes your life a little better
    12" PowerBook G4, G4 450 DP tower Mac OS X (10.3.9) on the Powerbook, and 10.4.2 on the G4 450
    12" PowerBook G4, G4 450 DP tower Mac OS X (10.3.9) on the Powerbook, and 10.4.2 on the G4 450
    12" PowerBook G4, G4 450 DP tower Mac OS X (10.3.9) on the Powerbook, and 10.4.2 on the G4 450

  • Solutions to Some DNS, OD, AFP, CalDAV, AFP, and Spotlight Issues

    I recently upgraded our aging Xserve (1.3GHz G4, yeah baby!) to Leopard Server from Tiger Server so everything in the office would all be on the same OS. This server hosts all our in-use files via an Xserve RAID, and our dead files are on the internal 3-disk striped array. It's also the Open Directory master and hosts the office's DNS (I wanted to put OD and DNS on the new Xeon Xserve that hosts our FileMaker database, Retrospect backup, and our Squid web proxy, but something in its DNS configuration is broken and I gave up on that since OD and DNS don't really put any additional stress on the G4). Anyway, with all the hoopla of configuring, reconfiguring, and fixing, I've learned some things that may help others.
    *DNS, Open Directory, and AFP*
    I had some trouble with groups and ACL permissions, inability to get CalDAV working, and general strangeness with OD and Workgroup Manager. Demoting the server from an OD master to standalone took care of most of these. Part of the problem was an incorrect LDAP search base, which can only be corrected by blowing away the OD master and making sure DNS is set up properly. We only have about 20 users (we don't host network homes or anything like that), so when I did the demotion I just let it destroy all the accounts, and after promoting the server back to an OD master, I recreated the users and groups from scratch. So with freshly created users and groups, and after resetting the ACL's and propagating permissions on the network shares, that cleared up the permissions problems. The corrected LDAP search base fixed the Directory application too, which wasn't showing any contacts before, and it got Kerberos working as well.
    iCal/CalDAV
    All this work also got CalDAV/iCal calendar sharing running, and when I enable calendaring for a user, it stays enabled in WGM. Before, whenever I'd switch to another user and come back, calendaring would be turned off in WGM, although it was in fact still enabled. I haven't tested calendaring much yet, and adding an account in iCal is still a bit flakey. Our DNS is just internal, so in Server Admin I un-checked "fully-qualified" for our few DNS hostnames. If I mark the server's DNS hostname as fully-qualified, auto-discovery of the address in iCal won't work. iCal rejects my passwords if Kerberos authentication is used in either case, even if I manually point it to the IP address, but it connects fine without Kerberos.
    *Spotlight and AFP*
    Another problem I had after upgrading the server was stale spotlight searches. I used Server Admin to turn spotlight searching on and off for the two shares, and I tried any number of mdutil commands and System Preferences "privacy" settings to turn indexing on and off and to rebuild the indexes. With the old machine and about a terabyte of data, indexing would take all night, so I couldn't really try a lot of things. Every time the index was rebuilt, it would propagate out to the office just fine, but it would never update from then on. The solution to that was changing the permissions on the volumes the shares are on. The shares themselves had the correct permissions and ACL's, but the volumes need their POSIX permissions set to:
    owner: root: read/write/execute
    group: admin: read/write/execute
    everyone: read/execute
    Over the years those permissions had been changed (this server started out with OS X 10.2 Server btw, so there's been plenty of time for things to get b0rked), but Tiger Server apparently didn't care. Another thing I did (although I'm not sure if this was necessary) was to change the "Others" POSIX permission from None to Read Only. Once all that was changed, mdworker started chugging along to keep the spotlight index updated. However, it went nuts after the 10.5.6 Server update, constantly working with no sign of ever finishing. The update notes do make specific mention to Spotlight changes, which says you have to disable spotlight indexing for any shares in Server Admin, then re-enabled it to "take advantage of the new features." That started another night of indexing, but it's now done and updating properly. I noticed that a new inherited ACL for the user "Spotlight" showed up at the root level of each share point. I'm not going to touch that.
    I'll admit that I hate spotlight's interface and lack of control in Leopard (i.e. it always resets your search parameters, you can't change the results window's columns, and you have to already be in the folder you want to search, etc.). That being said, I can search for anything on the server and it finds the results almost instantly. Even a search that returns "more than 10,000" results only takes about 5 seconds. With Tiger or Panther server, ANY search would take several minutes and grind the server to a halt, making anyone else who tried to save a file or navigate the shared volumes get the spinning beach ball.
    Hopefully this will be of help to someone.

    Hi.
    You've not outlined your issues with AFP per se, having any ?
    DNS is critical for OS X Server, it's appropriately finicky about working forward & reverse DNS lookup for its FQDN.
    Certainly, Leopard Server may make assumptions contrary to your intent, if using the non-advanced setups, as it will attempt to use DNS and if not available, this may result in settings other than you desire.
    By default, hostnames entered in the Server Admin DNS settings, will be considered as part of the DNS zone you're editing.
    So:
    server
    would be for: server.yourfqdn.com
    If you mark that as fully qualified, well, then it's looking for: server
    which is not a FQDN
    As well, I believe Apple states it should no longer be necessary, but if you do need to change the hostname for your OD master, it is often possible via the Termina/command-line via:
    (sudo) changeip
    http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Darwin/Reference/Manpages/man8/changeip .8.html

  • Revert to Tiger

    I just received my new computer - Leopard is not working for me at all. I mainly do music and even Apple's own program - Logic, is happier on Tiger, not to mention most of my other music software. Is there any way to gracefully return to Tiger on this computer? Remember, this computer came pre-installed with Leopard so it has never run Tiger. I do have a Super Duper copy of my previous computer which was a G5 running OS X 10.4.11. Is it possible to start up using my original computer, make this Quad-core the Target , format it, and then restore this drive with my G5? I would lose the last 3 days worth of work but at this point, it would be so worth it! Any help? Thanks.

    First problem is that there are known issues of music software not working with Leopard. As I said, everything from Apple's own Logic to Native Instruments to Spectrasonics. I've read posts in many different forums specifically documenting this. Second problem - I hate spotlight and time machine. I can turn Time MAchine off but Spotlight is built wrong. I have many firewire drives as well as internal hard drives with lots of data. I don't want or need Spotlight to analyze everything I have. I don't always have the same drives attached, I also attach other drives when transferring in projects - this creates havoc with Spotlight. So, you suggest turning Privacy on - what if I want to search for something that hasn't been indexed? Won't work - it only works with drives that have been indexed. I like the old method much better. But, still by far the most important issue is the fact that it is not compatible with a lot of music software that I use daily. I'm sorry I didn't ask about that before I purchased the computer.
    Like I said, back to my G5 and when Leopard fixes it's spots, I'll return for round 2.

  • Using Classic Version of Search with Tiger

    Hello all,
    I hate Spotlight or whatever the new version of search is called. I have many hardrives, tons of files and lots of eBooks. This means that whenever I try and search for anything, I get about 400 results back making it pretty much worthless. I'd really like to use the classic version of search that just looks for the search string in the file name. I really have no need to search within files. How can I get this functionality back? Thanks!

    Mister Patrick,
    Welcome to the "I hate Spotlight, is there something wrong with me?" discussions. In my opinion Spotlight was designed by geeks, for geeks. The people who like Spotlight are the ones who like the fact that it doesn't work, so that they can spend time devising ways to try and make it work.
    For the rest of us with stuff to do, the only way of finding files (uh, that's all you want to do, right?)is to forget there is such a thing as Spotlight, and use a utility called EasyFind, which you can download for free from VersionTracker.com.
    People keep saying Apple might fix spotlight, others say different.

  • Clear login password

    HELP please! I just received a mac from a relative. My first mac! The problem is he bid on a bunch of them from his kids school and unfortunately they didn't clear the password.
    I tried my ERD disk, didn't think it would work since it's for pc's.
    So, whats the best way to clear out the password so I can log on to it. All I know about is that it's a G3-blue and white. At boot it says OS X. Any ideas people?

    If you don't have OS installer disks, you will eventually run into trouble that you can't fix…
    Personally I wouldn't use anything below X.2.8 for stability, nor 10.4 unless I'd been tricked into it, because I hate Spotlight. If you want to run OS 9, even in Classic environment while booted to X, you will also need a 9.2.1 installer.
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  • I HATE my new MACBOOK PRO, it will not let me open any PDF files and I downloaded the ADOBE READER three freaking times and it keeps saying that all the files are corrupt. I would rather have my 2008 Dell at this point. what is wrong with this thing

    I HATE my new MACBOOK PRO, it will not let me open any PDF files and I downloaded the ADOBE READER three freaking times and it keeps saying that all the files are corrupt or damaged. I would rather have my 2008 Dell at this point. what is wrong with this thing

    Perhaps the PDF files are corrupted.
    Hit the command key and spacebar, a blue Spotlight in the upper right hand corner appears, now type Preview and press return on the Preview program.
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    Download the free ClamXav and run a scan on the possibly infected folder.

  • Spotlight/Searching does not work for afp shares in Lion

    Hi
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    Acrobat catalog, PDX, files only work from local or network drives.
    From Acrobat's Help;
    "Moving collections and their indexes"
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  • HT1668 I am seeing "all" my emails including those that I deleted days, months, years ago in the "spotlight search" screen of my iPad and iPhone. All account trash folders are emptied. How to remove?

    Hello.. I'm seeing all my emails from all my accounts located in the "spotlight search" feature of my iPad and iPhone4. What's most troubling is, there are emails that have previously been deleted. I have confirmed over and over that all trash folders for accounts are emptied as well as all other folders.. I empty the trash very regularly. When I select an email from the list in the spotlight screen, it will take me to an in box for that email where it may or may not exist.. Often it opens another persons email all together.. The bottom line is that I can not delete these emails and it's very nerve racking... Any help is greatly appreciated. Than you..

    Thank Goodness for Time Machine.  I was able to restore from a recent back up.
    However as a follow up I now have a glitch in that Icloud email will only restore from oldest to newest.  My Icloud.com account is fine. All my email are in chronological order from newest to oldest. 
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  • Spotlight with unsupported application - any answers?

    I find Spotlight very useful but have a backlog of files going back 15 years with a program that does not support Spotlight. I have asked the creators of the program repeatedly to implement Spotlight (metadata? or something like that) but they don't seem too bothered, and I'm very frustrated at not being able to search these old (and even new) files. I realized I could maybe write a script to open each old file and generate a PDF, which would then be indexed by Spotlight, but I hate the idea of creating so much extra data.
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    There is a solution for files that Spotlight does not support -- namely a free program called Easyfind.
    This program can search through directories (such as /private/var and also directories where printer drivers are stored) that Spotlight will not access. It will also search for all files and/or search through file contents in directories or for files that Spotlight does not access.
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    imac G5, 2GHz, 1.5 Gig RAM   Mac OS X (10.4.8)   (also imac G3 10.3.9; and Macbook Pro 10.4.8)

  • Spotlight on Xsan gone beserk

    Anyone ever seen spotlight indexing errors on Xsan 2? Xsan Admin was hanging badly when trying to index the Xsan volume. It's just a theory at this points, but spotlight seems to hate files from Unix or Windows, especially files which are unique on those filesystems but not on Mac OS X.
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    com.apple.metadata.mds[62]
    ERROR: _MDSChannelXsanFetchAccessTokenForUID: dead channel
    mds[62]
    (Error) Message: MDSChannel RPC failure (fetchPropertiesForContext:) [no channelAccessToken]

    Same here. Turned of Spotlight indexing on the three filesystems, but errors still comming identical to yours
    Probably not related, but who knows, also have loads of Console Log Entries (in the All Messages bit of console) that state...
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  • HT1338 After updating to Lion 10.7.5 I have had stability issues - Macbook continues to freeze and Spotlight is forever indexing. What's the fix?

    I am having real stability issues after installing Lion OS X 10.7.5 - my Macbook keeps freezing and Spotlight is forever repeatedly indexing - does anyone have any suggestions?

    I'm having the same problem with a Mac Pro desktop and it started after I upgraded to 10.7.5 . Exact same issue , Crashes for no reason ( very little running - mail,browser) then reboots. Sometimes it does multiple reboots.
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  • Spotlight takes the whole of the centre screen. Can it be moved

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    Am I missing a trick to this.
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    Also is there a way of doing simple calculations in the top right magnifying glass icon without using ons desktop?

    Spotlight window cannot be moved from the center.
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    You can add calculator widget to the Notification center.
    Launch Notification center from the menu bar, the right most 3bar icon in the menu bar.
    Select "Today" view. Click the "Edit" button at the bottom of the pane.
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    Click the black + on green  button next to the calculator.
    If you want remove the calculator from the widgets, click black "- " on red button beside "Calculator".

  • Spotlight Search Results - Sort by Date Modified

    Running 10.5.2 on a Mac Pro.
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    Why does Apple use AES encryption for FileVault? It has an NSA backdoor...
    And while I'm at it, I can't network with my PB180 running System 7.5.5 anymore (OSX 10.2 let me).
    GRRR! I hate when progress gets senile.

    Rants will get you nowhere on these forums except banned.
    If you want to report this to Apple, send Feedback and send bug reports and enhancement requests via its Bug Reporter system. To do the latter, join the Apple Developer Connection (ADC)—it's free and available for all Mac users and gets you a look at some development software. Since you already have an Apple username/ID, use that. Once a member, go to Apple BugReporter and file your bug report/enhancement request. The nice thing with this procedure over submitting feedback is that you get a response and a follow-up number; thus, starting a dialog with engineering.

  • How to use Spotlight?

    Does anyone know how to use Spotlight? I know I have a file named "Registered.txt" and Spotlight can't find it!

    There's been a change to Spotlight - one that lots of people really hate - but one that I like. By default, when you perform a search, Spotlight filters out all System and Library files. There are two solutions. First and the least technical is to simply open the Library folder and then enter the search string in the text box at the upper right.
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