[X-Unix] Spotlight (was: from tcsh to bash)

[John Baltutis]

On 05/21/05, Dan Frakes <lists at frakes.org> wrote:
>
> I'd argue that the reason people mainly search by name is that it's all
> they've ever really had. Sure, there was "find by content" in previous
> versions of the Mac OS, but it required that you index your drive (or at
> least some files), which most people had no idea how to do. Plus, even when
> you did index files, the feature often didn't work very well. In other
> words, it was a feature people either didn't know about, didn't know how to
> use, or had trouble getting to work right. Spotlight "fixes" these issues by
> making content searches a default option and by indexing content
> automatically.

And it still doesn't work very well. Check MacFixIt, MacInTouch, Examining
Spotlight article (<http://www.macintouch.com/tigerreview/spotlight.html>),
and Siracusa's article
(<http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/macosx-10.4.ars/9>), for starters.

>
> People didn't do Web searches much when search engines first appeared,
> either. But once people realized the power behind a search engine, these
> sites became the most popular on the Web. My prediction is that now that
> people are seeing content and metadata searches hyped by Apple and
> Microsoft, and are being "forced" to to use them (with Spotlight, by
> default, including content in searches), content searches are going to
> become more familiar to users. In other words, give "content searches" some
> time -- I think we'll find that in a couple years, people won't know how
> they used a computer without them.

I'm objecting to the "forced" part.

>> When the user decides to do a content search, then, and only then, should
>> Spotlight update that index-otherwise Spotlight can continue to update
>> everything, except content, as it currently does. If this setup was
>> implemented, search performance and indexing slowdowns would vanish.
>
> And the convenience of on-the-fly content searching would disappear, as
> well. The whole point of automatic indexing is that it makes a content
> search happen instantaneously (or nearly so).

Not so. I said leave it in as an option. If you want it, select it in the
PrefPane. But, give users the means to suppress, if that's what they want.
Or reverse my suggestion, make it the default, but give users the option to
turn it off.

> You're advocating throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I would argue
> that the solution here isn't to get rid of live indexing; it's to improve
> live indexing.

How do you arrive at that conclusion? I didn't advocate deleting the
capability. See my last comment.

>> Finally, searches shouldn't begin until you've selected it (clicking on the
>> go button or the return/enter key ) and there should be an option to turn
>> "searching on letters as one types" off. This business of starting when you
>> start typing is, IMHO, maddening and a performance zapper.
>
> I agree completely that it should be an option -- it bugs the heck out of me
> that if I misspell my search, I have to wait for the "live filter search" to
> pause for a second and then start over with the correct spelling.

Glad to see we agree on something.

BTW, you continually state that "You can easily tell Spotlight to include
/usr/bin in searches if you prefer such a configuration." Really? How? Not
in the PrefPane and nowhere in Spotlight's Help.

Apple's Spotlight Help states that "If you are searching for an item that
would normally be invisible in the Finder, or if you need to search a
folder that would normally be invisible in the Finder, you have two
options. Using the search criteria in the Find dialog, select Visibility is
Off (invisible) or Visibility is Any (visible or invisible). To use the
Toolbar Search for searching an invisible folder, choose Go to Folder from
the Go menu to select the folder, then search it." OK. Did that. Chose the
Go to Folder option, typed in /usr, then searched for apply in that window.
Did that executable inside /bin show up? Not on my machine, but I did get
over a thousand other useless results. Launched the Terminal app, typed in
locate apply, and instantly got: /usr/bin/apply,
/usr/share/man/man1/apply.1, and a couple of other useless links, but at
least it found the file and its associated manpage.

Cheers