Comment by Groxx | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Groxx | Hacker News Reader

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For myself:

With Alfred and a well-tuned Quicksilver, I can:

  * hotkey it open
  * punch in the minimum to identify the application I want (usually 1 or 2 keys, 3 for rarely-used ones)
  * hit enter

and be done with it in well below 1/2 of a second.

With Spotlight, I can:

  * hotkey it open
  * punch in the minimum to identify the application (over 2x more, almost all the time)
  * wait for it to update
  * it shows the wrong application / the last movie I played and finally displays the 3rd+ letters I typed
  * wait for it to update again
  * double-checking that it's the right application (it frequently isn't)
  * hit enter
  * hope it doesn't update *again*, causing me to launch the wrong application

the whole process typically taking >2 seconds nearly all the time, sometimes 5+ if it's a less-used application.

Quicksilver in particular has a nice 'open with...' method which gives you a couple keystrokes to pick the file, 'ow<tab>' to open with, and a couple keystrokes to open it in the application of choice, all generally in less than a second. Alfred might have something similar in the PowerPack (paid), but I haven't purchased it.

Strange, I've never found Spotlight to be that slow or frustrating. I just tried it again to be sure I wasn't kidding myself, and find that I type about 3 keys, and then there's the app I want by the time I'm finished pressing the 3rd key.

It's speedy for the first few months, but once I build up a few dozen gigabytes of documents it starts to slow to an absolute crawl. Useful when searching for documents, absolutely, and faster than alternatives. But worthless for applications, which I open far more often than the average document (from a launcher, that is).

But that might be because my .Spotlight folder is > 1 gigabyte. And that's smaller than it has been in the past - my previous hard drive had it larger than 2 gb if I remember correctly, because I had tweaked it to index my source code. On my wife's computer it's only about 400 meg, and it finds applications in about a second (still much slower than Alfred or Quicksilver).

Seems like a simpler alternative here is to disable Spotlight indexing on everything but Applications and System Preferences. First thing I do on a new Mac.

Thereby losing all search for and within documents, when faster alternatives for the most-common action exists? It's a tradeoff I'd never make, but it makes sense, and then it'd probably be lightning-fast.

Makes sense for me, but I don't really have "documents" - not on the filesystem anyway.

Definitely depends on your usage patterns :)

Unless of course you have an SSD. With an SSD, Spotlight is easily fast enough to work well. To start XCode, I hit CMD-space, xc, enter, with a split-second pause before the enter. That is enough for Spotlight to catch up to my typing and I am about as fast as Alfred or Quicksilver for opening apps.

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