[schmidtleonard]

Discord and VSCode work smoothly for me on an M4 MBP -- not sure if it's a compatibility difference or just performance hiding the problem, though.

But Spotlight file search is completely broken, rebuilding the index doesn't help, and web results are the only thing it returns. After 20 years of intense research, Apple finally caught up to Microsoft in race to make search broken and useless.

[brailsafe]

It's very possible that the hardware performance is hiding the issue. I upgraded from my 2020 intel 13" mbp (16gb of ram, 4-core i5) to 16" M4 Pro for a variety of reasons, but the basic processes of MacOS were making it nearly inoperable periodically throughout the day. I gifted the old one to my gf, and I can hear the fans spin up from across the apartment when nothing else is happening but indexing. I recall regularly being irritated that I'd just have to wait a while for the indexing process to finish before getting anything done. Idk wth is going on, but it puts far more strain on the system than anything else I could throw at it except games and Docker. Even ProTools doesn't seem to produce audible noise unless a bad plugin or a rendering is taking place.

Aside from that, the Settings menu memory leak (or whatever it the problem is) is very much more apparent on the older mac than it is on the new one, but it's still reproducible. Neither computer is running Tahoe yet, these issues were already present, but based on on your comment, they might now be functionally worse in addition to being a performance and user experience joke.

My new Mac is still amazing hardware-wise, and since those issues seem to just be compensated for, perhaps by having efficiency cores that they're able to delegate background processes to, but the sluggishness and in-adequacy of frontline processes and apps must be embarrassing for what I presume to be smarter engineers than myself who probably just don't get to allocate time or energy toward any of the problems, especially with things like Xcode and SwiftUI also having major issues, and the mac being a relatively small market.

[josephg]

I make a habit of turning off spotlight almost entirely. Search never returns what I want anyway, and the juice isn’t worth the squeeze.

Go into preferences, spotlight and you can add folders to exclude from indexing. I add my home directory and most of the system directories and that more or less fixes the issue.

[rpgbr]

That's the way to go. Who the hell searches for reminders or podcasts or anything besides files and apps on Spotlight?

[brailsafe]

Despite my complaints about performance, I do use Spotlight constantly, but like you say I'm just using it for apps and files, it's nothing but frustrating to see them try to redesign it around a global entity search paradigm.

[josephg]

Yeah. I wish there was a way to turn off full indexing of content. Content search always shows me pages and pages of junk. "Oh, looking for your todo list? That word showed up in this 1gb video file! And all these C header files. And ..."

The last good file search I've ever used was in windows 98. There was no indexing. When you did a search, it looked through all the subdirectories for a filename which matched the search term. It was glorious.

[brailsafe]

Ironically I use Spotlight constantly, and have always found the results mostly good enough for my uses. There are probably third-party apps that solve that problem more reliably though.

[jeffbee]

The instructions for fixing a Mac's corrupted spotlight index are amazing. I was planning to do it earlier this year, but the number of manual actions was just too ridiculous. Then, after it was broken for months, it spontaneously started working again.

[rpgbr]

It's a little heterodox, but not hard at all[1] and it takes literally less than a minute to trigger the rebuilding.

[1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/102321

[jeffbee]

The ones I was reading involved recovery mode and editing inodes.

[alsetmusic]

I’ve rebuilt my spotlight db several times over the years by adding root to the exceptions list and removing. Whatever you found was going way overboard.

[jama211]

Search works great for me, I’m sorry it broke on your machine but it needs to be broken for everyone to be on Microsoft’s level

[schmidtleonard]

Haha fair enough, and now it's fixed on my machine but Windows Search is still asking if you'd like Bing with that.

[navigate8310]

It's funny, bing literally means disease in Mandarin.

[jama211]

Hahaha always with the bing

[duskwuff]

> But Spotlight file search is completely broken, rebuilding the index doesn't help, and web results are the only thing it returns.

I had the same issue; killing Spotlight processes fixed it. (A reboot would probably do the job too.)

[schmidtleonard]

Hey it worked. Thanks!

(Killing the process, ofc)

[jks]

Finda <https://keminglabs.com/finda/> is the best file search I've seen for macOS. (Incidentally, it has an Electron UI.)

Doesn't seem to be updated for Tahoe yet, and even the Sequoia version isn't notarized, so it's not really clear if it has a future.

[tw04]

M4 works great for me. M1 Max with 64gb of memory consistently has issues.

[JumpCrisscross]

For what it’s worth, my 2020 M1 normal is chugging along like the champ that it is :).