Questions tagged [spotlight]
Questions about Spotlight, a system-wide desktop search feature of Apple's OS X and iOS operating system.
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Spotlight Keeps Forgetting the System Drive
I've recently upgraded to macOS Sonoma, and while sometimes when I search for the name of an app in Spotlight it returns it immediately (so I can just hit enter to open it), sometimes it behaves as if ...
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How to completely reset Spotlight search data on macos 15 beta?
My Spotlight is stupidly broken, because it is searching for a non-existent contact.
Rebuilding the index does not help at all, of course, I really need to erase all Spotlight data.
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Spotlight search not showing up on display in focus
I have connected my macbook to an external display. My MacBook screen is currently on focus.
When I try to bring up the spotlight search with keyboard shortcut, it shows up on my external display. ...
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Spotlights Store.db File
Long story short... We have a user whose Notes app bit the dust and they lost everything. Years of work and personal information. No backup either. When we do a search for the notes in Spotlight, ...
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Finder search shows 0 results for searches inside user folder
It seems from a bit of research that Finder search is a frequent source of issues for people, and I have tried the standard System Settings and mdutil approaches to rebuild the Spotlight database, but ...
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How to troubleshoot why custom Finder search keeps breaking?
I use macOS 12.7.5. I have a custom Finder search (a .savedSearch) that searches a folder for files matching two criteria, Kind is Music (All) and Composer is Example.
I set this up on an older ...
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How can I assign a keyboard shortcut to a process to open a Spotlight window and repopulate it specific filter(s) (eg. "Kind" == "Folder")
My current process to search for a specific directory listing uses Spotlight wth filters in a regular Finder window. I add file attribute filters to refine my search to folders only, and sometimes a ...
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Spotlight not functional
Sonoma 14.4.1 on MacBook Pro M1.
Spotlight (cmd+spacebar and from the menubar) cannot find any file. It only finds (sometimes) the apps in the /Applications folder. Correspondingly, search in Mail ...
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Spotlight doesn't activate applications after selecting them
Both of my two Macs have recently suffered from a problem where suddenly Spotlight will no longer open files or applications. For example if you search for the string setting it will show System ...
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Is there a list of all kMDItemContentType value's - or most common at least?
Does anyone know of such a list? And can you generate a list from the file types on your system?
For example:
public folders - mdfind 'kMDItemContentType == public.folder'
And what about kind, as ...
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Spotlight indexing turned off, but want to turn it on only for Applications
New Macbook, I've turned off Spotlight indexing because it takes massive loads of processing power for ages. Also because I only use Command+Space for searching apps.
Spotlight off:
% sudo mdutil -sa
/...
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How to exclude a folder from `find`?
In a MacOS terminal I am trying to find files with the find command and to exclude the folder .Spotlight-V100/ .
I tried
find . -name .Spotlight-V100/ -prune -o -type f
and
find . -path .Spotlight-...
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Shortcut Input from Spotlight
How can one write a shortcut that receives input from Spotlight search GUI (e.g. command+space)? I'd like to press command+space and type "ticket 12345", then have the shortcut generate the ...
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mdworker running as wrong user (macports instead of _spotlight)
I've just noticed a strange issue on an older (High Sierra) system I've nearly finished setting up – namely I'm seeing mdworker processes running as the user "macports" rather than the user ...
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How can I prevent the Spotlight shortcut from being re-enabled?
I use Raycast instead of Spotlight, so I've re-assigned the cmd-space hotkey to Raycast and disabled the shortcut in System Settings > Keyboard > Keyboard Shortcuts > Spotlight.
Until ...
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