How to use Spotlight to search file and folder names quickly

The only way I can stand to use Spotlight is via "mdfind". You can do this
in the Terminal or you can wrap it in an interface. Even this, however, does
not solve the real problem, which is that there are some places and some
kinds of file that Spotlight simply doesn't see. m.

--
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I'm glad you wrote this - Spotlight was one of the chief things I
upgraded to Tiger for, and I've been hating it ever since. I was
starting to wonder if it was just me.

My first frustration is as you note - as soon as you start typing,
spotlight starts searching - which means it instantly gives you the
Spinning Pizza of Death until it's found every file containing the
letter 'e', before allowing you to begin your real search for 'esoteric'.

My habit now is to start by selecting "Other", not to select my real
search root, but to select 0 places to search. Then I can set up my
real criteria in piece, before telling it where I really wanted to
search. My how much time they've saved me by removing an explicit
'search' button. (If I know I'm not on a network, clicking 'Servers' as
an initial search source provides a slight shortcut.)

My next frustration became clear as I've been on 'vacation' with my
PowerBook for this past week - in the silence of a peaceful hillside,
I've become more aware of Spotlight (I believe) ceaselessly churning my
disk to index data, thus drastically running down my battery. Is anyone
aware of a way to tell Spotlight not to index when the machine's running
off battery?

In keeping with the general trend towards infantilising users, there
doesn't appear to be any explicit control over Spotlight's indexing.
The closest I've come found is to tell Spotlight in the "Privacy"
section not to index my whole disk. Of course, on a subsequent occasion
I needed to find something, and Spotlight naturally returned no results.
  So then I had to switch it back on. When on another occassion I tried
the same trick to switch it off, I got a long SPOD each time I tried to
add a volume, or even a folder, to the "Privacy" list - but no actual
results. A few days later, it worked again.

Bah humbug. I'm sure it will be very lovely when it's refined - but has
Apple completely abandoned user testing of new features?

- Ben

I haven't upgraded to Tiger yet, thus I haven't used Spotlight for my
own work, but I know that when Tiger first came out, I tested
Spotlight at an Apple Store on a number of computers, and watched
others use it, as well as having tried it on a few more computers
outside the confines of an Apple store, and never experienced the
spinning beach ball while conducting a search with Spotlight.

So, what's the cause of this obvious problem on some computers and
not others? Is there a definitive answer? I'm about to finally
upgrade to Tiger and I'd like to know how to prevent this from
happening to my computer.

Thanks.
Brian White

On Aug 31, 2005, at 9:22 AM, Ben Rubinstein wrote:

> I'm glad you wrote this - Spotlight was one of the chief things I
> upgraded to Tiger for, and I've been hating it ever since. I was
> starting to wonder if it was just me.

I just love Spotlight, and it is making me more productive, though I
do think it has its flaws that I hope will be improved in future
versions. We're running it on a G5 dual processor as well as on a now
aging G4 667 Titanium, and we think it's speedy and delivers accurate
results, and I'm particularly thrilled at the grace and speed with
which it sorts through years and years of Mail files, PDFs, etc. For
a first version, I'm extremely impressed.

Nobody would probably ever have considered me a champ at organizing
files and folders. I've got tons of documents, images, and thousands
and thousands of fonts nested in folders within folders. When I find
something, it's often stuffed layers deep, with related folders near
it, and it would be so much easier to access a view of the folder
structure from within the results window - a related file often will
not contain any of the terms I used in the original search. Going
forward, it's not as necessary to create so many layers of folders,
but I do have a gazillion layers that I've created over the years.

>
> Bah humbug. I'm sure it will be very lovely when it's refined -
> but has
> Apple completely abandoned user testing of new features?

I think that in terms of new and powerful features that can convince
PC users to Macs, even the slowest Spinning Pizza Of Death will
produce speedier and much more accurate results that Windows will.
While some committed Mac people will find Spotlight less than perfect
(of course I'd like it to be even faster and be able to read my
mind), it's an extremely compelling feature for the larger market,
and one that leaves Longhorn and Google Desktop Search in the dust.

Marilyn

On 1/9/2005 1:22 AM, "Ben Rubinstein" <benrcogapp.com> spake thus:

> I've become more aware of Spotlight (I believe) ceaselessly churning my
> disk to index data, thus drastically running down my battery. Is anyone
> aware of a way to tell Spotlight not to index when the machine's running
> off battery?

That doesn't sound right --- after the initial index, Spotlight should only
update itself when you add/remove/change files. I certainly don't notice it
doing anything on my machine at all these days, based on the observation
that after the initial indexing, I've never again seen the Spotlight icon in
the menu bar animate (it has a little pulsing dot inside the magnifying
glass when indexing). Check your Spotlight icon when your PowerBook is
"churning", that should tell you whether it's the culprit.

I suppose that I haven't been hit by Spotlight issues as much as some people
because (a) I know where all the stuff I use regularly is, (b) I don't use
the Finder anyway (I use Path Finder, which doesn't yet support Spotlight)
and (c) half the time when I want to find something, it's a Unix file
anyway, and I just use locate in a Terminal window :) (I should probably
get into the habit of using mdfind instead --- hmm, alias locate to mdfind
perhaps?) The couple of times that I have used Spotlight (from the menu
bar) it was to find obscure files that I couldn't remember where I'd filed,
and it worked great.

Hmm, that's interesting, I just tried locate vs. mdfind, and rediscovered
the big advantage of mdfind over locate: it searches all metadata and
content, whereas locate only does filenames.

% time locate postscript
[ 6 files found, all with "postscript" in the name ]
1.792u 0.105s 0:03.45 54.7% 0+0k 0+0io 0pf+0w

% time mdfind postscript
[ 4608 files found, including PS, EPS, fonts, and an XML file of Hamlet :) ]
0.476u 1.802s 0:24.60 9.2% 0+0k 902+6io 0pf+0w

Interestingly, the CPU utilisation of mdfind vs. locate seems much better.
I'm impressed, and it only starts searching when I'm good and ready :) I
can see that I'm going to have to learn a bit more about Spotlight queries
now...

--
Nigel Stanger, Dunedin, NEW ZEALAND.
http://public.xdi.org/=nigel.stanger

At 08:04 -0700 UTC, on 2005/09/01, Marilyn Matty wrote:

> On Aug 31, 2005, at 9:22 AM, Ben Rubinstein wrote:
>
>> I'm glad you wrote this - Spotlight was one of the chief things I
>> upgraded to Tiger for, and I've been hating it ever since. I was
>> starting to wonder if it was just me.

Same here.

> I just love Spotlight, and it is making me more productive, though I
> do think it has its flaws that I hope will be improved in future
> versions. We're running it on a G5 dual processor as well as on a now
> aging G4 667 Titanium, and we think it's speedy and delivers accurate
> results, and I'm particularly thrilled at the grace and speed with
> which it sorts through years and years of Mail files, PDFs, etc. For
> a first version, I'm extremely impressed.

In the sense of finding stuff I must agree. Spotlight indeed does find the
right things more often than not, and fast.

My beef is mostly with the Finder Spotlight UI. Like others, for me it almost
always starts searching after I have typed just 2 characters. I do not type
slowly. In fact I type extra fast, trying to avoid this from happening, but
it still almost always does happen.

Another major gripe is how it doesn't remember anything anout the UI. Every
new search starts out with the same settings.

And lastly, Spotlight is yet another Mac OS X area where some aspects require
you to use the mouse.

From what I've seen and read about the actual Spotlight engine, Spotlight is
pretty good. It's its UI that just sucks way too much. (So much so that I
have found myself advising several home users to stick with Panther for now,
where the search UI does work. Spotlight wouold be *much* nicer for them, but
only if the UI would be fixed.)

Of course I would want even more, like being able to configure whether it
should show just all search results per category by default, instead of just
5. And I'm sure there are many more aspects that wouold be nice to be able to
configure. But much first the basic UI needs to be fixed. I honestly just
can't work with it and have found myself completely ignoring Spotlight - just
easier to search 'manually' almost always.

A deeper lying problem is with using comments to afect Spotlight's search
result, yet losing them if you ever need to restore from back-up. (My
'solution' is to just not bother adding comments...)

Btw, I think that part of the Spotlight UI problems are actually Finder
problems. For instance, double-clicking the parent folder of a result opens a
new window in Icon view *always*. *Expletive* that! If the Finder allows me
to set it to always open new windows in column view, than it should bloody
well *do* so. (The same shit happens when you mount a remote volume.)
Similarly, the Finder's Copy Progress window requires a mouse to interact
with it :(

It should also be possible to configure Spotlight to sort results not by what
kind of fille, but by name, size, modification date, etc. Finder.app already
knows how to show that (in list view), so why can't Sotlight?

I agree with what someone else wrote: this level of inconsistency and
mouse-dependancy makes me wonder whether Apple is serious about QA these
days. Mac OS pre-X had plenty of bugs and was instable. I love Mac OS X. It's
a huge step forward. But it's also a big step backwards in many ways. Things
did not used to be this inconsistent Mac OS pre-X.

[...]

>> Bah humbug. I'm sure it will be very lovely when it's refined -
>> but has
>> Apple completely abandoned user testing of new features?
>
> I think that in terms of new and powerful features that can convince
> PC users to Macs, even the slowest Spinning Pizza Of Death will
> produce speedier and much more accurate results that Windows will.

Maybe, but a lot of long-time Mac users being negative about such a major
aspect of Tiger (according to Apple's own marketing campaign Spotlight was
the main point of Tiger) probably won't sound very appealing to Windows users.


--
Sander Tekelenburg, <http://www.euronet.nl/~tekelenb/>

Well, I use Spotlight pretty regularly on my dual G5, a PowerBook 1Ghz, and an iBook G3, without many issues. My preferred method is to type kind:folders if I'm looking for a folder, or kind:pdf if I need a pdf document. It would be neat if I could make spotlight default to have 'kind:' already in the entry box when it opens. Also, I'd like a few more similar shortcuts, like file types, for instance, or creator types. Anyway, finding a folder is nearly instant and if it's a recently opened folder, it will appear at the to of the list if you just enter 'kind:folder' without any additional description. For app launching I still use Launchbar. It's my Command-Space launcher. I change Spotlight to 'Control-Space' as the hotkey. And for us font addicts, kind:font is handy!

On Thu, Sep 1, 2005 at 4:04 pm -0700, Brian White wrote:

>I haven't upgraded to Tiger yet, thus I haven't used Spotlight for my
>own work, but I know that when Tiger first came out, I tested
>Spotlight at an Apple Store on a number of computers, and watched
>others use it, as well as having tried it on a few more computers
>outside the confines of an Apple store, and never experienced the
>spinning beach ball while conducting a search with Spotlight.
>
>So, what's the cause of this obvious problem on some computers and
>not others? Is there a definitive answer? I'm about to finally
>upgrade to Tiger and I'd like to know how to prevent this from
>happening to my computer.

 Yes, this intrigues me too. I'm running Tiger on two ageing Macs: a
Pismo (G3/500mhz) and a 400mhz G4 tower, and I've never experienced the
beachballing in Spotlight on either Mac. (Plenty of other gripes with
Spotlight, but not that one.) So it doesn't seem to be related to
underpowered hardware.

But I do see exactly the same behaviour when using DevonThink's
incremental search; it locks up half way through typing a word and
produces a bunch of useless results before allowing me to continue
typing. Oddly, I've not seen any complaints about that, but it'd be
interesting to know if DT is using similar system calls or not.

TimH

Interesting bit of informaton in "Mac OS X 10.4: Where does Spotlight search?"at http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=301533. It's major shortcoming is lack of instructions on how to expand searches outside the user's home directory (e.g., /Library/Documentation or /Developer/ADC Reference Library) and the inability to use Spotlight preferences to tell Spotlight where to do these expanded searches.

I have mixed feelings about Spotlight. But if Apple is commited to it (remember Sherlock?) things should get better.

This tip at Mac OS X Hints has saved me a lot of time. An AppleScript that copies text to the clipboard. We can then paste in the search box to avoid the slow letter-by-letter Finder search.

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20050523131630541

I tried typing kind:doc and got only pdfs. Is there a way to get only documents with the .doc extension? Where is this stuff documented? Mac Help ground for 15 minutes and found nothing. Couldn't find it in Apple knowledgebase.

On or about 9/6/05 2:58 PM, thus spake "stanhoffman"
<stanhoffmanmindspring.com>:

> I tried typing kind:doc and got only pdfs. Is there a way to get only
> documents with the .doc extension? Where is this stuff documented?

It's documented starting here:

<http://developer.apple.com/macosx/spotlight.html>

What I would do is say in the Terminal:

mdfind "kMDItemContentType=='com.microsoft.word.doc'"

Then let's say you wanted to add a text content attribute to that, you'd
say:

mdfind "kMDItemContentType=='com.microsoft.word.doc' &&
kMDItemTextContent='test'wc"

m.



--
matt neuburg, phd = matttidbits.com, http://www.tidbits.com/matt/
pantes anthropoi tou eidenai oregontai phusei
AppleScript: the Definitive Guide -
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0596005571/somethingsbymatt
Take Control of Word 2004, Tiger, and more -
http://www.takecontrolbooks.com/tiger-customizing.html
Subscribe to TidBITS! It's free and smart. http://www.tidbits.com/

How to use Spotlight to search file and folder names quickly Posted by: stanhoffman Date: Sep 6, 2005.

I tried typing kind:doc and got only pdfs. Is there a way to get only documents with the .doc extension? Where is this stuff documented? Mac Help ground for 15 minutes and found nothing. Couldn't find it in Apple knowledgebase.

".doc" seems to work.

-- Paul Schatz Chem Dept University of Virginia

(Catching up on old TidBITS-Talk messages...)

On 1 Sep 2005, at 11.08 pm, Nigel Stanger wrote:

> On 1/9/2005 1:22 AM, "Ben Rubinstein" <benrcogapp.com> spake thus:
>
>> I've become more aware of Spotlight (I believe) ceaselessly
>> churning my
>> disk to index data, thus drastically running down my battery. Is
>> anyone
>> aware of a way to tell Spotlight not to index when the machine's
>> running
>> off battery?
>
> That doesn't sound right --- after the initial index, Spotlight
> should only
> update itself when you add/remove/change files. I certainly don't
> notice it
> doing anything on my machine at all these days, based on the
> observation
> that after the initial indexing, I've never again seen the
> Spotlight icon in
> the menu bar animate (it has a little pulsing dot inside the
> magnifying
> glass when indexing). Check your Spotlight icon when your PowerBook is
> "churning", that should tell you whether it's the culprit.

In my experience, the icon in the menu bar isn't always used to
indicate whether indexing is happening or not. Frequently, when I
first wake it up in the morning, my machine seems to be doing things
with the disk in the background. A trip to the Terminal and 'lsof |
grep mdimport' reveals plenty of entries of indexing going on (often
involving the Address Book when I look, probably a coincidence) --
and all without the icon in the menu bar doing a thing.

For example:

...
...
...
...
mdimport 21787 davidhome 5r VDIR 14,2 238
1831980 /Library/Spotlight
mdimport 21787 davidhome 6r VDIR 14,2 612
1826227 /System/Library/Spotlight
mdimport 21787 davidhome 7r VREG 14,2 6148
323025 /Users/davidhome/Library/Preferences/.DS_Store
mdimport 21787 davidhome 8u KQUEUE
0x02f96d80 count=0, state=0x2
mdimport 21787 davidhome 11r VREG 14,2 682351
3464875 /Users/davidhome/Library/Application Support/AddressBook/
AddressBook.data

But the icon is still resolutely pulse-free.

David Shepherdson

Den 21. sep 2005 kl. 17.31 skrev David Shepherdson:

> A trip to the Terminal and 'lsof |
> grep mdimport' reveals plenty of entries of indexing going on (often
> involving the Address Book when I look, probably a coincidence) --
> and all without the icon in the menu bar doing a thing.

lsof will not tell you if anything is going on, only if the file is
open or not.

I am not a specialist for CLI-things, but I would check something like

ps -axw | grep mdimport | grep -v grep

instead to see if the process is running or just

top -l1 | grep mdimport | awk '{ print $2,$3 }'

to see how much CPU it is actually using.

If something is using your CPU when you wake up, it might just be
something different, perhaps the dashboard that seems to live a life
by its own. mdimport is very efficient in my book.

Cheers,

Kim