After so many years of being anal with file management, it's been hard to remember to use spotlight on a regular basis. I already know where everything is going only a few folders deep at most.

It has been nice though trying to find those obscure things from many moons ago.

I can't bring myself to be disorganized enough to need it.

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I often use Spotlight searching five or more times an hour as a navigation tool. Instead of tediously navigating through certain wide and deep hierarchies to get to a particular folder I want to work in I'll search for an item I know is already in that folder, then reveal it in Finder (with command-R) to open its containing folder. It "flattens" the hierarchy so I don't care how deeply a folder might be buried in it. And whenever possible I'll first highlight some text to search for in a Service-enabled app, then use shift-command-F to Spotlight it (and ignore the console warnings that produces :-)).

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I was using LaunchBar, but then I thought "okay okay I'll give Spotlight a try", but it's SLOW, I want instant! So I disabled it and got Quicksilver. Now I reinstalled and just turned Spotlight indexing off and use Quicksilver. command-space for QS and command-option-space for Spotlight. It's a good combo: QS for apps real quick and Spotlight for, well, I'm not sure yet!

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I have been using spotlight to launch apps, which is really nice since it avoids both dock bloat and the need to open a new finder window to launch an app. However, I do agree that it is a bit slow. If this Quicksilver would be a good alternative, where could I get it?

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Quicksilver is available here. I find it much more useful for day-to-day use of my computer than Spotlight. In fact, I think that Spotlight has been overhyped. I would have rather received a Finder that is faster to respond.

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I use Butler to launch apps, which performs a similar role in my system as quicksilver in yours... command-space runs butler search (two letters is all it takes to pick an app, then return). i have set spotlight to F1 and F2 for menu bar / spotlight window respectively...

I mention Butler as it also does many other things: i have F4 set to do a fast user switch to the login window and buttons F5-F8 doing play/pause/next/prev in iTunes. Sweet.

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Just out of curiosity, why did you switch from LaunchBar to QuickSilver? I'm a long-time LB user (and love it) ... is there a reason I should look at QS? (One thing I love about LB is it's "adaptive learning" capability ... and that I can go into it's Config and customize what keystrokes it will recognize to open a particular app/file.)

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never use spotlight menu (totally disable it).
sometimes window search (only in current folder and always by file name).

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unix, metal, bike, snowboard, girls!

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This could be a bad thing. Now instead of organizing my files, I just stuff them in my 'Documents' folder, and rely on Spotlight to find them. I also use it to find applications. I probably use it 10-20 times a day.

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Disabled spotlight pretty early on due to the bug where the process just runs wild. My poor iBook was practically melting. I went through the apple forums with all the other sufferers looking for a way to fix it but there is none.

Now it just behaves like the old fashioned Find which is fine with me until apple fixes it. I have easyfind available for more complex searches.

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Spotlight is too slow to replace an organized filesystem, at least for me. I had hoped that I could at least use it as an application launcher, but it's much much slower than Quicksilver, which is no speed champ itself for that matter. Butler is still proving to be vital to my OS X life...


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on 10.4 server the spotlight was performing pretty poorly before 10.4.2.
that especially as i have 4 partitions. i normally know that something i cant find is not in the system partition, but when i can't or could not find it with spotlight, it was pretty frustrating and hopeless. e.g. searching for "skype" when i had skype installed on the partition with 10.3 would give no results.
and for other reasons, i learned more the limitations...

when i need to find something that most people would look with spotlight or finder, quite often i use 'mdfind' command in terminal. that finds far better what i am looking for.

most of the times i keep files organized anyway - i don't like or rely on the 'smart folders' especially as i need to ssh constantly from other systems that are not always running 10.4.

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Giaguara

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Unfortunately, Spotlight rarely orders the files I want so that the one I want is in the Top Hits list. For instance, I wanted to find a PDF of a file I reference very, very often. Because I refer to this file so often in written documents, if I type the exact filename into the Spotlight window, the file is never in the top set of hits. By the time I click "Show All" and click on the reveal triangles, I could have navigated the Finder hierarchy more easily. I would very much like Spotlight to "learn" files to which I commonly refer and move them to the top of the list.

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