Ghassan Maslamani Blog and Portfolio

Boost the speed of spotlight search MAC-OS.

how-tomac-os

When working on any software development, it is most certainly that you are going to use dependency. For example for a node.js project, there might be a bunch of npm packages and those packages probably depend on other packages...etc, so you will end up with hundreds of files.

And that is okay, I guess this is how the development environment supposes to be. Until you just want to search for a personal document, and you don't remember where this file or document is saved but that is okay, I mean isn't this the point why a feature like spotlight search exists after all!.

However if you like me, works on various projects, then when you are searching for something, it will look for it on all directories, and this recursive search will take sometimes a few seconds to complete. Unless you opt-out of directories/folders of development projects, how?

Well, Apple has a setting to exclude some locations(directories) due to privacy, we could use that option to exclude directories of software development thus excluding thousands of files, thus boosting the speed!

To easy to do so you just go to preferences -> Spotlight -> Privacy option and then choose which locations or directories which aren't needed to look in while searching. For more detailed instructions visit: [Change Spotlight Preference]https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/mac-help/mchlp2811/mac

Note: This might not be a good option for you if you use the spotlight for searching for files that you use for development, it wasn't the case for me but it might be for you!.


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