Questions about Spotlight, a system-wide desktop search feature of Apple's Mac OS X operating system.
6
votes
3answers
147 views
How to add folder to Spotlight “do not index”?
Is there any way to programmatically add a folder to Spotlight's "Privacy" tab?
Either through Terminal or Applescript?
Often I want to click on an item in Spotlight results in Finder, and have that ...
3
votes
3answers
558 views
Login hangs on spotlight and no network is available
After upgrading to Lion, I boot up and most of my icons don't appear on the right side of the top menu bar and when I hover over spotlight, I get the spinning pinwheel and there's no network access. ...
1
vote
2answers
86 views
Does the search in Finder need spotlight?
I just reinstalled OS X Lion and turned off the spotlight immediately.
I noticed that search in Finder stopped working. Is this because of disabling spotlight? Is there a way to get this back without ...
1
vote
2answers
389 views
Spotlight: Unable to index network SMB share
I'm trying to turn on spotlight for my NAS drive. I have it mounted in OSX 10.8.2 as the following:
/Volumes/Trogdor (smbfs, nodev, nosuid, mounted by soltrain)
mdutil returns the following:
...
0
votes
2answers
37 views
How to find files not containing comment x?
I try to find all "*.xyz" files in folder x which does not have comment "abc". This code does the opposite. I would prefer to use Spotlight if possible. How i can do this?
Thanks
do shell script ...
0
votes
2answers
208 views
Spotlight on mid-2012 MacBook Pro with Mountain Lion Constantly Re-Indexing
On my 4-month old mid-2012 MacBook Pro I observe that Spotlight seems to want to ALWAYS re-index. I frequently notice that the performance will get unbearably slow and I can hear the hard drive ...
5
votes
1answer
209 views
Why is mdfind only returning my most recently accessed files?
I've imported most of a javascript code base via mdimport (using the packaged SourceCode.mdimporter provided by Xcode) and it succeeds. However, mdfind only ever returns to me at most two results, ...
2
votes
1answer
37 views
Spotlight Doesn't Properly Show Preference Panes
I'm having an issue where Spotlight isn't properly showing results for System Preference panels. When I search for a preference panel by name (e.g. Sharing or Network), I don't get any System ...
2
votes
1answer
221 views
Why do some app spotlight results show the “.app” extension, but not all?
Even though I've explicitly set the Finder preference to display all file extensions, I'm still finding that some apps do not show the file name extension in their Spotlight result.
Here are some ...
1
vote
1answer
20 views
Auto switch input source to English when entering Spotlight, typing URL in Safari, etc
I don't have files with non-english names, and don't type non-latin URL's, so question is how to auto switch system input source in these occasions.
1
vote
1answer
27 views
Spotlight not indexing attachments of exchange Mail
I recently got a MBP and really love how quick spotlight is. I'm reading my exchange email via the Apple Mail app. The messages are indexed by spotlight but the contents of the attachments are not.
...
1
vote
1answer
280 views
Rules for Spotlight search (on osx 10.8)
I absolutely do not understand the rules that Spotlight (osx 10.8) uses to search my files. If I enter the query sbml and select filename from the dropdown menu, these are the results that come up:
...
1
vote
1answer
77 views
Performing unit conversions in Spotlight
Is there a way to perform unit conversions from within Spotlight? For example I want to convert 1 ft^3 to cm^3 in spotlight.
1
vote
1answer
102 views
How to find out which file triggered an action from spotlight
I've created an applescript application (in automator) to open ssh urls. The application is bound to the ssh:// url.
I've got a lot of user@host.inetloc files and search these in spotlight. Selecting ...
0
votes
1answer
32 views
Finder spotlight tool not “grepping” through all file types?
We've got this development stack that's mostly javascript, and if I'm looking for a variable definition or something I can use Finder's spotlight tool to easily find the file that contains the ...
0
votes
1answer
523 views
Spotlight doesn't work anymore in OS X Mountain Lion
I can't get Spotlight to search for any documents.
When I search the Finder for documents, nothing happens and the Spotlight search through the menu bar only shows up web searches.
0
votes
1answer
107 views
Mac - spotlight stuck on top
How do I get rid of it? It doesn't show up on task manager. It isn't dead, it responds to the mouse wheel and scrolls up and down.
Screen shot below...
0
votes
1answer
3k views
How to delete email messages from Spotlight search on iPhone?
I have a iPhone 4S running iOS 6. Spotlight seems to find deleted e-mails on iPhone, how can I delete e-mails permanently from Spotlight results?
Could this potentially be a bug in iOS 6? I am ...
0
votes
1answer
859 views
Mac OS X Lion, can't find network files over SMB protocol using the Spotlight
I tried to find some files in a network volume mounted in a Mac OS X Lion over SMB using Spotlight. Didn't work.
BUT, when I tried the same search from a Mac OS X Snow Leopard it worked perfectly.
...
0
votes
1answer
141 views
Is there a way Spotlight indexes my Skim bookmarks/notes ?
I find Skim is a great pdf file reader and want to spend a great deal of time adding notes and bookmarks to some of the pdf files I have.
I know Spotlight indexes pdf files but it doesn't seem to ...
2
votes
0answers
345 views
Why can't I search files and folders on my external NTFS drive on Mountain Lion?
I have tried to re-index my external drive by removing it from Spotlight's privacy settings and putting it back there. I tried with mdutil in the terminal and I've got the following log:
bb:~ bb$ ...
1
vote
0answers
77 views
“Displays” system preference not showing in spotlight
I've recently upgraded to Lion 10.7.5., though not sure if my problem is related. In spotlight, I can't get the "Displays" system preferences option to show up in the results. I've tried re-indexing ...
1
vote
0answers
208 views
Spotlight Woes! Can't search, can't reindex, can't find
Help!
Spotlight stopped working ... if I go to spotlight search (top right), it just hangs.
Same with Apple-F in Finder ... it causes Finder to hang for a minute or so. Cannot search.
I went to ...
1
vote
0answers
502 views
helpd uses 100% CPU after installing any application with documentation
I see that after installing a software that ships with documentation in OS X’s help document format, the helpd process uses 100% CPU for up to 5 minutes or so. I also see this when you first install ...
0
votes
0answers
9 views
What backup methods preserve kMDItemDateAdded?
The attribute kMDItemDateAdded corresponds to the "Date added" column in the Finder, and is especially useful for the Downloads directory. Unfortunately, this attribute is not part of the filesystem ...
0
votes
0answers
15 views
Is there a way to omit certain directories from where Mac OSX finds applications for its Applescript dictionaries et al?
Mac OSX maintains a list of applications for Applescript dictionaries, for the open-with list in finder etc.
This list gets collected from local directories (e.g. /Applications) but it finds as well ...
0
votes
0answers
75 views
Document files with incorrect date stamps
Often the document files I create, modify and save show up only to have incorrect date stamps, as if they haven't been indexed correctly (or at all). This happens with any document file type ...
0
votes
0answers
44 views
Why does “ATSFontFindFromContainer failed: count = 2” appear thousands of times in my system.log?
Just now, I looked at Console Messages and system.log in the Console application. I saw thousands of repetitions of messages like the following:
Dec 30 00:01:54 MyName-2 com.apple.quicklook[39867]:
...
0
votes
0answers
75 views
Add spotlight indexing for CSV files
On my system (Mountain Lion) Spotlight doesn't do a full-text search for comma-separated values, but I can search them with Spotlight if I rename them to .txt for example.
Is there a way that I can ...
0
votes
0answers
17 views
indexing svn repositories via spotlight
Is there a way to have spotlight index an svn repository on a Mac server?
I have thought of doing an export and indexing that, but how about indexing the repository itself?
I am aware of web-based ...
0
votes
0answers
447 views
External hard drive not indexed by Spolight on Mac OS X Mountain Lion
I recently bought a new hard drive and it is not indexed by Finder. I tried to get it re-indexed by following this tutorial: http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13727_7-10330114-263.html and I even tried ...
0
votes
0answers
33 views
Search across multiple OS X computers via offline indexing
A feature I would love to see in Spotlight or some other Search/Indexing application would be the ability to search multiple desktops even when they are not currently connected via AFP/Bonjour or ...
0
votes
0answers
182 views
How do you fix an app icon that got associated with a file type in spotlight?
When I try and search for something using spotlight, all application results show the .c file extension icon instead of the actual app icon you would expect to see for FireFox, Safari, Mail etc. Very ...
0
votes
0answers
215 views
/.fseventsd (File System Event Store) is empty?
For some reason my /.fseventsd directory (for the File System Event Store) is empty. I suspect this isn't normal, especially because the .fseventsd directory on my external drives have about 15 files ...
0
votes
0answers
173 views
Spotlight no longer able to index or search Mail.app
For a while now Spotlight has been unable to index Mail.app messages on my 10.6 system. In system.log I always see sections like:
Jun 30 13:34:43 macbook mdworker[8819]: Error loading ...
0
votes
0answers
312 views
Finder Search attribute “Tags”
It looks like the search attribute "Tags" is no longer available in the Mountain Lion Finder. I used this to quickly find Open Meta Taggged files on my Mac by means of a Smart Folder. Is there an ...
0
votes
0answers
46 views
“Open in Finder” dock command opens Preview instead
When I use the "Open In Finder" command in any Dock Folder Preview opens and scans the entire folder opening any file it can recognise. The same thing happens when I select an item in from the search ...
0
votes
0answers
98 views
Search across networked drives that are only sometimes connected
I've got networked drives at work and networked drives at home. What's a way to set up search so that it automatically applies searches to each drive when connected without having to rebuild the index ...
0
votes
0answers
215 views
“Search files” in a NAS using AFP and Samba?
I've a Synology NAS with all data from our Mac company division, 1 Terabyte of data.
The problem is that the "search" files isn't working. Before, we used Spotlight with success: it works, and it was ...
0
votes
0answers
195 views
How can I view the items in the Spotlight cache?
I'd like to view the data spotlight has imported. Is this possible?
EDIT: For example I can do this:
mdutil -svvv /Volumes/h8rdrive
and find out this volume was indexed.
I'd kind of like to ...
