I really want to like Spotlight in 10.4. In theory it should be great: instant access to any file or app by typing a few words. In practice it’s sluggish as hell, making it almost unusable for me. Here’s how I tend to use Spotlight:

1. Click the Spotlight icon.
2. Start typing the name of the file I’m looking for.
3. After typing about 5 letters, Spotlight locks up with a spinning beach ball for 30 seconds, then slowly starts to produce results.
4. Meanwhile, I switch to the Finder and end up manually finding the file I was after before Spotlight has even finished telling me where it is.

To make matters worse, I recently bought a backup hard drive. Spotlight has decided this would be great fun to index, even though I don’t want it to. Here’s what I see practically every day:

Not only is this indexing unwanted, but it slows down my Mac for those 19 hours, and slows down Spotlight itself even further (if such a thing is possible).

I was chuffed to find that you could exclude a volume from Spotlight indexing as follows:

1. Go to System Prefs > Spotlight.
2. Click the “Privacy” tab (surely “Performance” would be more appropriate!).
3. Drag the Backup volume from a Finder window to the list below the “Privacy” tab – but make sure you drag the actual volume icon (in Go > Computer in Finder) and not the alias in the shortcuts bar on the left, or Finder helpfully deletes the alias instead, with a cute little “whoosh” noise.
4. Close System Prefs. This makes Spotlight stop indexing the Backup volume. Hurrah!

However…

Unmount then remount the hard drive (by rebooting, or by power cycling the drive – something I do at least once a week) and Spotlight forgets that it wasn’t supposed to be indexing the Backup volume, and starts all over again. Back to square 1! So every few days I find myself dragging that god-damn Backup volume into System Prefs.

Surely there has to be a better way! I know I can turn off Spotlight completely (sudo vi /etc/hostconfig and change “SPOTLIGHT=-YES-” to “SPOTLIGHT=-NO-“), but I do occasionally find Spotlight useful for those times when I just can’t remember the name of a file.

I have heard that Spotlight is much snappier in Leopard. I hope that’s true, and I also hope that you can reliably exclude volumes from being indexed. Which reminds me – I really must upgrade to Leopard soon, mustn’t I. I’m just scared of it breaking all my apps!

This entry was posted on Friday, January 25th, 2008 at 11:37 am and is filed under Mac OS. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.