[setopt]

> Apple Spotlight is and always has been lightyears ahead of whatever garbage Microsoft use on Windows.

I certainly agree on that, and I also find it more convenient than the desktop search options I’ve tried on Linux (there I usually drop to the command line to search).

But despite really wanting to like Spotlight, e.g. its integration with Apple Mail with email previews is great, I find it unusable for heavy work. I’ve tried customizing it to disable lots of search backends that I don’t need, but still for reasons I don’t understand, it sometimes takes 5+ seconds to process my search results before showing anything, and even the average search often takes a second and is not well-sorted.

In comparison, Alfred is always instant at searching on my computer, and I really prefer how you can explicitly tell it what you are searching for (e.g. `'filename`, `in file contents`, `=math`, etc.) whereas Spotlight tries to guess this and often guesses wrong. It’s also easier to customize if you want to integrate e.g. specific web searches in it.

I’ve tried Raycast since lots of people praise it, but I still find Alfred to have a nicer and more responsive interface, but perhaps it’s just what I’m used to.

[frereubu]

I think something is wrong with your Spotlight index if it takes that long. Recently something went a bit funny with my Spotlight that made it take as long as you're describing, but after a reboot it's pretty instantaneous as usual. I work with large numbers of files (tens of thousands per project, with about 40-50 projects) so I don't think it can be that. I'm pretty sure there are ways to rebuild your Spotlight index.

I haven't come across issues with ordering, but my use cases are usually pretty simple, so that might be down to a difference in our workflows.