I understand the desire to disable Siri system-wide, but Spotlight? How else are you going to find your files?
I'm often annoyed how slow/unreliable Spotlight is, especially in Mail, but what's the alternative here?
I'm often annoyed how slow/unreliable Spotlight is, especially in Mail, but what's the alternative here?
A feature I never wanted has ruined a feature I do want. It’s a complete own goal. In frustration I turned spotlight off completely a few months ago. Rip.
also, for opening apps, https://charmstone.app/ is pretty great.
What I find really annoying with macos is that with stock/default settings it is the worst UX. You have to download an app to launch apps, an app to move and resize windows, an app to reverse the mouse's wheel direction to be the opposite of the trackpad, an app to manage the menu bar (esp decrease the spacing, so that you can fit items up until the notch). Then, you also need anyway to spend an hour tweaking settings and run custom commands (such as `defaults write -g ApplePressAndHoldEnabled -bool false` so that you can actually type stuff like aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa). These are just needed to make using macos bearable, and do not include any kind of "power user" kind of stuff.
I used to hate macos before getting my own mac, because I had to use some at work in their default settings and it was just a horrible experience.
what problem was really solved here?
And then you'll have to wait for grep to trawl every folder to find the right file rather than consult an optimised index.
Oh it doesn't have those things so is a non-option.
Tahoe in general sucks but Spotlight has been a pretty good local search for nearly twenty years. The image OCR added in Sonoma made it even more useful.
Good for you. Do you want a medal?
Finding files often means more than just looking in folders for adequately named files. Sometimes, it's looking for the contents of files, for things that aren't files (because some kinds of files on macOS aren't actually files, they're folders that are treated specially by the system), and for things like contacts, calendar events, reminders, mail, etc.
Only if it's tastefully done, and says something like "Grep Champion"
I do, but 80% of the time I'm able to locate it by opening the directory where I would put it. And 10% it's in the "other" directory. And since I have the shell history, in the remaining case it is still a simple search.
I personally disable these kinds of search indexes in favor of find and ag/ripgrep etc. They are very fast on a modern system with SSD.
Not available to regular folks I guess, but use prewritten aliases to simplify.
I essentially use it as an app switcher. Sometimes I'm jumping between 6 different apps across multiple monitors and multiple workspaces on each and it's faster do type the first couple letters of the app I want and hit return than to Cmd+Tab, parse the icons in their unpredictable order (made harder by all icons being squircles now), and tab to which one I want.
But native spotlight is too slow and unpredictable.
Apple is not there yet, but kind of drifting towards becoming the new windows.
Perhaps if macs let you configure Spotlight to ignore some directories you could tell it to ignore the entire disk? Which would disable it in practical terms.