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.
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.
I want spotlight to open applications and system settings. But full disk indexing makes spotlight basically useless for that, because its index is filled with crap. Instead of opening zed I accidentally open some random header file that’s sitting around in Xcode. It’s worse than useless. And that says nothing of the grotesque amount of cpu time spotlight wants to spend indexing all my files.
A feature I never wanted has ruined a feature I do want. It’s a complete own goal. In frustration I turned spotlight off completely a few months ago. Rip.
I think it's been said in this thread already, but it sounds like what you want is Alfred https://www.alfredapp.com/ it's a great app, use it every few minutes every day.
I am also in OP's boat and, even though these are great suggestions, personally I would like to be able to do a basic thing such as opening an app with a built-in way rather than having to download yet another app to do that. Every major macos update I have to worry about spotlight reindexing things.
What I find really annoying with macos is that with stock/default settings it is the worst UX. You have to download an app to launch apps, an app to move and resize windows, an app to reverse the mouse's wheel direction to be the opposite of the trackpad, an app to manage the menu bar (esp decrease the spacing, so that you can fit items up until the notch). Then, you also need anyway to spend an hour tweaking settings and run custom commands (such as `defaults write -g ApplePressAndHoldEnabled -bool false` so that you can actually type stuff like aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa). These are just needed to make using macos bearable, and do not include any kind of "power user" kind of stuff.
I used to hate macos before getting my own mac, because I had to use some at work in their default settings and it was just a horrible experience.
Spotlight search relevancy is a complete joke. If only they did some embedding based search across the system and paid attention to basic precision recall numbers. This has gone from bad to worse quickly.
this is what grep is for. Why do I need a service constantly indexing my system and wasting resources for the few times a month I might need to run grep <string>?
Ah yes, grep's famous support of PDF and Office documents will surely come in handy. As will its image OCR capabilities.
Oh it doesn't have those things so is a non-option.
Tahoe in general sucks but Spotlight has been a pretty good local search for nearly twenty years. The image OCR added in Sonoma made it even more useful.
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.
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.
> Never in the past decade have I thought to myself, "gawrsh, I wonder where this file is on my laptop hard drive."
I do, but 80% of the time I'm able to locate it by opening the directory where I would put it. And 10% it's in the "other" directory. And since I have the shell history, in the remaining case it is still a simple search.
I search for stuff all the time. But full disk search just never seems to solve the problems I have. Whatever keyword I’m looking for will inevitably show up in thousands of unrelated header files, Python files and JavaScript files in various node_modules directories and whatnot. Search in finder (or spotlight) is always way too noisy to actually do what I want it to do. Spending hours of cpu time to build that a useless index is deeply disrespectful.
The typical find oneliner to do a fulltext search invokes sed. sed supports regular expressions, so you can do quite a bit more than just a simple text match. And you can also invoke various filter chains on the results.
That might be true in theory, but in practice a find oneliner is still the fastest way to find things. It shouldn't be the case, but a fulltext search is faster than using the OS index, because the former is stable and improved for decades by low level developers, while the later is continuously recreated by people who like Javascript in the UI libraries of the OS.
Because the index generator is broken and constantly using up CPU and memory to index things you'll never look for? I mean, it shouldn't be that way, but unfortunately is.
I personally disable these kinds of search indexes in favor of find and ag/ripgrep etc. They are very fast on a modern system with SSD.
Not available to regular folks I guess, but use prewritten aliases to simplify.
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.
And I can tell Windows search to not index some directories. Like node_module with a million small files I don't want to search in anyway except with grep.
Perhaps if macs let you configure Spotlight to ignore some directories you could tell it to ignore the entire disk? Which would disable it in practical terms.
Not a fan of Spotlight here too. But, you certainly can instruct Spotlight to ignore some directory or drive through System Preferences > Spotlight and selecting the Privacy tab in it which allows you to add the directory or drive that you want Spotlight to not index.
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)