Is there a good indexing desktop search app?

[tanyet]

There have been a few really painful things I've learned switching from windows to mac and this is one of them. I know Spotlight is functional and some people love it but for the life of me I can't figure out why.

My windows desktop search was so simple. You click on a drive, search for a term and it was found instantly. Spotlight sometimes never finds the file. I'll rebuild the index through onyx and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. It just shouldn't be this difficult. I should have to type in search variables just to find a file on an external drive.

I've downloaded EasyfFind and it's pretty useful but it still has to do a search because it has no index.

Any suggestions?

 

[w0lf]

http://www.alfredapp.com/

 

[GGJstudios]

There have been a few really painful things I've learned switching from windows to mac and this is one of them. I know Spotlight is functional and some people love it but for the life of me I can't figure out why.

My windows desktop search was so simple. You click on a drive, search for a term and it was found instantly. Spotlight sometimes never finds the file. I'll rebuild the index through onyx and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. It just shouldn't be this difficult. I should have to type in search variables just to find a file on an external drive.

I've downloaded EasyfFind and it's pretty useful but it still has to do a search because it has no index.

Any suggestions?

You don't need a 3rd party app to search your drive. Use Finder to search all or any portion of your drives. It's very accurate and fast. If you're not getting the search results you expect, try re-indexing your drive (OnyX is not needed for this):

Spotlight: How to re-index folders or volumes​

If that fails to index, enter the following command in Terminal:

sudo mdutil -i on "/Volumes/your drive name"​

 

[tanyet]

Thanks for the suggestions guys. I spent a good deal of time last night trying to figure out what was going on.

I found out that I had used my external drive (the one I wanted to search) as a Time Machine backup awhile back. Apparently once it has been used for a Time Machine backup Spotlight will not index anything else on the drive beside the Time Machine data. I hadn't realized that. I disconnected it from Time Machine and it worked when I reindexed it.

It's working much better now. I'm glad I can cross that one off the list. I guess I'm so used to how Windows deals with things that I'm going through a re-learning process. Wouldn't trade my rMBP for anything though.