I have a beef with Spotlight

akadmon said:

It used to be unobtrusive, but lately it's decided too take over my machine for what seem like hours at a time, to the point I've given up and turned it off altogether. You would think that whatever has already been indexed would remain indexed, but nah-ah-ah... In their infinite wisdom, Apple engineers have decided that turning Spotlight indexing off means I no longer want to perform any searches whatsoever -- not in the Finder, not even in Mail. If I want to be able to search again, I have to rebuild the Spotlight index from scratch. I mean hello - how stupid is that!

Do you guys know of any third party program that allows one to a) control when indexing is done, and b) maintain a searchable index irrespective of whether or not indexing is turned on?

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There is always Quicksilver but I haven't used QS since Leopard. I find Spotlight tends to build its index more often than I'd like but when I use it, it always finds what I'm looking for. You do have Spotlight indexing turned OFF on your Time Machine backup, right? That's a huge drain that slows down not only Time Machine but the rest of my Mac as well. For instance, I have my TM backups go to a firewire drive (from time to time) and to a Time Capsule (daily at 3am). I have indexing switched off on both of those drives. The other day, I turned on "calculate all sizes" on the root folder of the LaCie drive and all went well until it got to backups.backupdb (the folder containing the TM backups) and the machine slowed down and my fans came on. I switched off calculate all sizes and all was normal again. Basically, tell OSX to keep its nose out of your current and even older TM backups and all is smooth. I suppose this means restoring individual files might be slower than it would if I allowed the indexing to run. So what. I don't really use that feature.

I may be the only Mac user who, on installing a fresh copy of the OS, IMMEDIATELY DISABLES Spotlight and turns off all indexing.

It's a feature I don't need. I don't like all that disk activity going on. I don't need or want "indexes" on my hard drives.

My opinion only.

Fishrrman said:

I may be the only Mac user who, on installing a fresh copy of the OS, IMMEDIATELY DISABLES Spotlight and turns off all indexing.

It's a feature I don't need. I don't like all that disk activity going on. I don't need or want "indexes" on my hard drives.

My opinion only.

Click to expand...

I used to do that on Windows but I find OS X Spotlight indexing to be unobtrusive after the first 24 hours or so after any OS upgrade or fresh install. Do you use Spotlight to launch apps? I prefer to click Spotlight and type the first few characters. I suppose I could go clicking around in the Applications folder but for me it's so much faster to click Spotlight and type dv{enter} to get dvd player up and running or ha{enter} to launch handbrake. BTW, you could blacklist your entire drive and only allow Spotlight to search your Applications folder so you'd still be able to use it as a launcher. I like seeing apps, files and email messages in one long list when I use Spotlight. Sometimes it reminds me of something I forgot to do.