[kruuuder]

I understand the desire to disable Siri system-wide, but Spotlight? How else are you going to find your files?

I'm often annoyed how slow/unreliable Spotlight is, especially in Mail, but what's the alternative here?

[analogpixel]

Store your files in a file structure that makes sense so you know where things are? I have never used Spotlight to find a file because I put files in sensible places.

[giantrobot]

I use Spotlight all the time to search for the contents of files. I don't memorize the contents and names of every file on my system, that's what my computer is for.

[zapzupnz]

> I put files in sensible places

Good for you. Do you want a medal?

Finding files often means more than just looking in folders for adequately named files. Sometimes, it's looking for the contents of files, for things that aren't files (because some kinds of files on macOS aren't actually files, they're folders that are treated specially by the system), and for things like contacts, calendar events, reminders, mail, etc.

[PrairieFire]

I’m not a turn spotlight off guy but it is a bit of a pig in terms of apple’s approaches to system crawling and indexing and how it leaves its metadata detritus all over the disk. I can see the desire to disable it for some.

[1718627440]

macOS is POSIX compatible, so find(1) ?

[pavel_lishin]

Or `locate`, or mostly remembering where files live?

[azinman2]

Why would you want to disable an index in favor of an O(N) search?

[ekropotin]

Alfred/Raycast

[t-sauer]

Both are built on top of the Spotlight index.

[vosper]

Spotlight is much improved in Tahoe - faster and with better results.

[zapzupnz]

Faster and better, but in all its time, it's never gotten better than Alfred which, ironically, depends on the Spotlight index.

[cormorant]

Many people are experiencing the opposite.

[hbn]

I was hopeful that they'd finally give us something to make Alfred unnecessary but it's still slow as shit, so I'm still using Alfred.

I essentially use it as an app switcher. Sometimes I'm jumping between 6 different apps across multiple monitors and multiple workspaces on each and it's faster do type the first couple letters of the app I want and hit return than to Cmd+Tab, parse the icons in their unpredictable order (made harder by all icons being squircles now), and tab to which one I want.

But native spotlight is too slow and unpredictable.

[lizardking]

Seems worse and slower for me. YMMV

[CafeRacer]

Id disable half - if not more - of default services. Thats why my next laptop will be linux.

Apple is not there yet, but kind of drifting towards becoming the new windows.

[layer8]

Windows at least lets you disable any service you want.

[mikkupikku]

Personally I store a list of my files, with tags, in a sqlite database. Granted, I have a lot of custom tooling to make that practical..

[pfortuny]

I use Quicksilver and I have Spotlight disabled.

[striking]

Raycast is lovely for opening up applications, at least.

[PrairieFire]

Challenge with trying to use Raycast more broadly in lieu of Spotlight for systemwide search is Raycast appears to be built on top of the spotlight indexes (mds mdworker)

[t-sauer]

Doesn't Raycast (and all the other popular alternatives) build on top of the Spotlight system?