Comment by whartung | Hacker News Reader

Comment by whartung | Hacker News Reader

I know this is talking about large files like photos and videos.

And I get the whole storage is cheap line of thinking.

But there’s actually a different problem outside of photos, etc. Simply, index pollution.

I have lots of little projects on my machine. I have lots of open source code on my machine. And, while I can’t think of any specific examples, there are areas of search on that, dare I accidentally trip into that hole, are just filled with detritus and garbage.

My Spotlight is gorged with false positives for some terms. And I know that I have searched for things that I know I have, but unable to locate, or at least certainly not easily, because I was searching “wrong”.

Indexing provides lightning fast access to everything I don’t want to see.

Mind not much I plan to do about it. I guess I can take some “never again“ stuff, put them on an external drive, and tell Spotlight to ignore it.

That said also, my phone is full. About 2g free. Mostly photos and videos. Mostly my cats. Solution is simple. Need a bigger phone.

You could swap to Windows. The search there never finds anything, not even files that you know exist in the root of the directory you are searching inside.

Everything is the cure! https://www.voidtools.com/downloads/

I love Everything, and it has a dark-mode in the latest beta! And finds stuff instantly, no more wait.

WizFile also works relatively well (and its companion WizTree is so much better than WinDirStat).

Man that’s so true.

And don’t get me on how the start menu is able to show you the bing results seconds before the installed application you were searching for.

The search feature is so ridiculously unusable since years that I can’t imagine that someone in the windows team cares anymore.

I somehow remember the indexed search to somehow work back in the vista days when it was brand new.

You can turn off the Bing search.

I don’t think that was the main complaint.

Why can’t my local application matches show up in an imperceptible amount of time?

On my previous laptop, Windows 10 search was totally broken. For several years and despite me occasionally spending an hour trawling for fixes.

On my new laptop, which I bought a year ago, still running Windows 10, it has always worked perfectly. Not sure if MS fixed something, or some kind of indexing error happened on my old laptop.

It would nice if you could somehow deprioritize folders so that the files within them don't show up in the top N results in Spotlight, because yeah it's probably not useful for it to present source files from that one sprawling project I forked and tinkered with a couple years ago.

You can remove folders from spotlight indexing. I do it for all the source code folders.

I’ve also built a small tool to check whether some git repo is in sync with upstream, so it could be deleted: https://gitlab.com/leipert-projects/git-recon

When I’m done with a project, I’ve taken to packing up these kinds of files into a disk image. That way, I can access them if I need to, but they don’t show up in search. There’s a risk that the image gets corrupted or isn’t readable on some future OS, but since these aren’t mission critical files, I’m not too worried about that.

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