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Comment by adastra22 | Hacker News Reader

I don’t want to make my search more ambiguous. That is the opposite of what I want.

The existing search on macOS was almost completely useless to be fair

Spotlight search has sucked from Day 1 of OSX. You need to use Find Any File [0] or some equivalent tool if you want to search the actual file system without being limited by Spotlight's never-properly-updated "index."

The functionality of Find Any File was built in to Mac OS 9 and earlier. It was rock-solid reliable. So of course Apple removed it and now to get reliable search you have to use a third-party tool. Or 'find' in the Terminal.

[0] https://findanyfile.app/

This is why I rip out spotlight on my mac and replace it with FZF

Would you have a guide? Particularly on the rip out part. Fzf is no nice unless you trigger it on a dir too big (e.g. your entire home).

I also resort to

  cd / && rg --no-messages --files | rg "name"

Spotlight was really good on Tiger idkwym

I desperately need something like Everything¹ for macOS!

¹https://www.voidtools.com/

Find Any File is solid, but it scans on demand, so it never quite feels like Everything. The closest I've found is Cling from lowtechguys: it keeps its own index of the whole disk, including the hidden files and app data Spotlight skips, and results show up as you type with fuzzy matching.

Thanks for the heads-up!

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