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Comment by atombender | Hacker News Reader

Regarding Spotlight, one thing that started happening for me on Sequioa was that Finder and other apps started getting very slow to react to file changes. For example, I can save a new file to a directory, and the Finder window takes maybe 10-20 seconds before the file shows up in the list. If I navigate to a different folder and then back, the file is there. I notice the same delay in apps like IntelliJ.

I could be wrong, but apparently Spotlight is the service that drives this kind of file system watching. I think macOS has a lower-level inotify-style file system event API, which should be unaffected, but Finder and these other apps apparently use Spotlight. I really wish I had a fix, because it's just crazy having to constantly "refresh" things.

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My favourite feature is when spotlight tells me that indexing is paused when I am searching for something.

You went through the effort to show some UI when something I am looking for may not be there because indexing is paused... but you didn't think to just unpause the indexing so that I can find it? I feel like I am being spit on, "Yeah, you not finding what you are looking for? I know, I'm not even trying"

I highly recommend using Alfred. I’ve been using it since before Spotlight came out, tried and then disabled Spotlight, and went back to Alfred. It’s extremely configurable but highly usable out of the box. Sort of like creating your own CLI shortcuts to open files, apps, copy things to the clipboard, etc.

https://www.alfredapp.com/

Alfred is nice. I use Raycast these days: https://www.raycast.com/.

I still use Quicksilver[1], the open source app that long predates Alfred and was the inspiration for it. I tried Alfred a few years ago but didn't see anything compelling enough to switch. Am I missing anything?

[1] https://qsapp.com

I use Alfred and I used to use Quicksilver.

Probably not.

This KILLS me. It's so frustrating. APFS is supposed to be great at deduping files and such, but in practice it seems like it really sucks. It's bad at both saving a file to the desktop and dumping a million npm files into a directory.

Same here. Spotlight used to be my everything, i.e. I never use the dock I would always use spotlight to launch applications or navigate to folders. Now it is littered with internet garbage, takes seconds to even return any results, and the results are always useless.

Who the hell thought integrating internet search is a good idea - because "aösldkfjalsdkfjalsdkfj" just as everything else is a valid search result in Spotlight now showing me "Search for aölsdkfjöalsdfjasdlfkj in Firefox"...

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