Spotlight Strikes Back: In Leopard, It Works Great

Another interesting feature, when using the Spotlight Menu (but not from the finder window) type in a mathematical expression such as 4*(8+7). Spotlight will happily inform you that the result according to Calculator is 60. It's actually not a bad way to perform quick calculation's while doing other work, maybe even faster if not as functional as switching to a calculator (I use PCalc) widget.

On 12-Nov-2007, at 15:58, TidBITS Editors wrote:
> You specify additional criteria by showing and configuring
> additional Criteria Bars; to do so, just click the + button in any
> existing Criteria Bar. But here's the real trick: if you click the +
> button while holding the Option key, you get a special Boolean
> Operator Criteria Bar. The pop-up menu here says Any, All, or None
> (the equivalents of the Boolean OR, AND, and NOT operators), and it
> applies to the Criteria Bars that are grouped just after the
> Operator Bar and indented to the right. Such groups can themselves
> include a Boolean Operator Criteria Bar, and so you can form Boolean
> expressions of any depth and complexity (the equivalent of using
> parentheses in a logical expression). The default operation, used if
> you simply set multiple criteria without grouping them, is AND (that
> is, all the criteria must be true at once to get a match).


Oh wow, this is freaking brilliant!

The only issue I have is that, apparently, once you save a search,
there is no way to edit the terms of the search. Well, ok, that's not
quite true, you can view the criteria under the gear menu, which seems
like odd placement to me, but you can't SAVE new criteria to one of
the default searches. For example, I wanted to change the 'All
Movies' search to just ones created in the last 2 months, but to do
that I have to make a new search.

I've made a saved search for system files ending in '.conf' whose type
is not mail message or aliases. Nice.

What I'd like to figure out is how to make an index of non-executable
plain text files in /etc, /opt/usr/local/etc and /usr/local/etc. that
is to say, the conf files that are not named .conf. Haven't found a
way to limit the path yet, but I know it's possible via the Raw
query. Something to do tomorrow when the servers are down :)

Still, the nested boolean options for spotlight are very nice. When
are we going to get those options in Mail.apps smartboxes and iTunes
playlists?

Seems odd to not fully integrate spotlight into all the Apple apps;
though I could understand it iTunes was different due to its cross-
platform nature. But Mail? Having nest-able boolean operators and
spotlight searching for smart mailboxes would be fantastic. I'm
tempted to try creating a finder saved search for some of these.

I think I'm going to make a stack (another use for stacks) of several
saved searches so I have easy access to them without cluttering up my
sidebar and reserve that for just the main searches I will likely use
most often.

Hello,

I do think Spotlight on Leopard excludes folders (e.g. ~/Library),
which makes it far less useful for search for left-overs of
applications for example.

        Daniel.

Tiger Spotlight: "...Some areas of the hard drive were excluded from
the index, so files in those places couldn't be found, even by name;
this exclusion was hard-coded into Spotlight (it wasn't a preference
the user could access), so there was no way even of learning what the
problematic places were..."

Modify file: /.Spotlight-V100/_rules.plist <-- 2 dots, 2 slashes, 1
dash, 1 underscore

Add files/directories to the INCLUDE section like: /System, /Library, /
bin, /sbin, /private, /usr

Get Spotlight to reindex: in Terminal: mdutil -E /

No longer works for Leopard.



Leopard Spotlight (and Tiger too): For the Finder Search Window, if
you find that you are always selecting the same things for your search
criteria, there is a way to make them default. Set up the search
window exactly the way you want it. Save the search somewhere you can
easily access it. The icon is a folder, but the file is really a
plist. Open it using TextEdit and look at it.

The default configuration for the find window is hidden inside the
Finder in a file named "default_smart.plist"
/System/Library/Coreservices/Finder.app/Contents/Resources/
default_smart.plist.

Make a back up of that file and replace it with the saved search file,
renaming it of course. Or open the file and paste in the contents of
the saved search file.

Be sure to repair permissions and log out (or maybe reboot) to get the
configuration read.

It was a great and informative article about Spotlight, its minuses in Tiger and its pluses in Leopard, but - there is always a 'but', isn't it? But, I felt tempted to download NotLight to see what was so good about it, and that led me to wonder whether those who are not satisfied with Spotlight as it was, are people who are not so imageoriented.

My problem with Spotlight (Tiger) is that it doesn’t seem to search inside my PageMaker 6.5 documents that I have copied from my old PowerBook to my new one.

However if I open one of these PM fikes with InDesign then Spotlight will find words within them.

Is there anyway to get spotlight to index words within PM documents copied from my old PowerBook to my new one?

I, too, love the revamped Spotlight.  It's everything I was hoping it to be in Tiger. 

One concern.  When you launch a search via Command-F from the finder, the default is to have the "Kind" dropdown box (set to Any) available.  I like this.  However, when I do a search via Spotlight ( i.e. Command-space) and select show all results, I have to hit the "+" icon to add my Kind filtering.  This is a slight step backwards compared to Tiger -- in Tiger, "show all" brought up the Spotlight Window.  While I agree that this window didn't fit in, it did have the breakdown by file type.  In Leopard, there's an extra step there (hitting the + icon) that isn't intuitively obvious.

Any way to make the default window have the "Kind" field appear when you show all results from a Spotlight search?

On 11/16/2007 08:16 AM, "mark.business" <mark.businessverizon.net> wrote:

> My problem with Spotlight (Tiger) is that it doesn¹t seem to search inside my
> PageMaker 6.5 documents that I have copied from my old PowerBook to my new
> one.
>
> However if I open one of these PM fikes with InDesign then Spotlight will find
> words within them.
>
> Is there anyway to get spotlight to index words within PM documents copied
> from my old PowerBook to my new one?

Yes, find a PageMaker Spotlight plugin.

--
John C. Welch

On Nov 16, 2007, at 9:01 AM, chris_kohuch wrote:

> Another interesting feature, when using the Spotlight Menu (but not
> from the finder window) type in a mathematical expression such as
> 4*(8+7).

Ahhh... Lauchbar has it beat. You can do much more complex
calculations in Lauchbar such as 2**5 (which is 32), or cos(pi). And,
I still like the way Lauchbar finds my applications. Typing "MW"
brings up Microsoft Word.

Of course, Launchbar is not free. Also, when Launchbar rebuilds its
index, it returns you to the space where Launchbar was launched. I
found if I use spaces, I have to modify Launchbar to occupy in "All
Windows".

David Weintraub

On Nov 16, 2007, at 9:01 AM, LewisGmail wrote:

> The only issue I have is that, apparently, once you save a search,
> there is no way to edit the terms of the search.

It's a kludge, but if you rename or append your .savedSearch
to .plist, you can open it up in Property List Editor and edit it
directly there. Or you can wait a week or two for Matt Neuberg et al.
to release a free utility that makes it far easier. ;-)

> What I'd like to figure out is how to make an index of non-executable
> plain text files in /etc, /opt/usr/local/etc and /usr/local/etc. that
> is to say, the conf files that are not named .conf.

Take the set of files you want to look for; type mdls <filename> at a
Terminal prompt to see all of the Spotlight searchable attributes;
find the common factors; boom, you should be good to go.

> Haven't found a
> way to limit the path yet, but I know it's possible via the Raw
> query. Something to do tomorrow when the servers are down :)

Try "-onlyin" followed by a pathname at the end of the query -- that's
how you do it with mdfind in Darwin.

Best,
Jeff

With the demise of the _rules.plist file and not wanting to hack the default_smart.plist, which I've done in Tiger, does anyone know a way to permanently make Spotlight index "anything I want" on "my machine", without having to waste time creating smart searches and cluttering up my Desktop or Dock? For example, all those precluded places the engineers think I shouldn't be looking at, such as ~/Library/Preferences or /Library/Preferences. Is there any way to make FileName the default instead of Contents? Finally, does anyone know how to delete or add Search Results categories in the prefPane? I have no need for Images, Movies, Events, Contacts, etc., but do want Preferences, CoreServisces, etc. These are the things that I want in a search engine.