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Can You Disable Spotlight and Siri in macOS Tahoe?

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Re: Can You Disable Spotlight and Siri in macOS Tahoe?

#71

Post by mixmastamyk »

azinman2 wrote: post #19
1718627440 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

macOS is POSIX compatible, so find(1) ?

Why would you want to disable an index in favor of an O(N) search?

Because the index generator is broken and constantly using up CPU and memory to index things you'll never look for? I mean, it shouldn't be that way, but unfortunately is.

I personally disable these kinds of search indexes in favor of find and ag/ripgrep etc. They are very fast on a modern system with SSD.

Not available to regular folks I guess, but use prewritten aliases to simplify.

Re: Can You Disable Spotlight and Siri in macOS Tahoe?

#72

Post by evilduck »

andrewmcwatters wrote: post #25

A small but big detail that irritates me is one used to be able to search Applications faster through the dedicated Applications overlay, but now this behavior appears to just be a shortcut to Spotlight, which suffers from incredibly poor index planning. In the past, when Spotlight was too slow to show me my most used applications by the first few letters, I'd bail and use Applications. Now I'd have to use Finder, bu…

Tahoe's new Spotlight refresh includes an application specific option (open spotlight then arrow/cursor to the right or press cmd+1), and it will only match on applications, which is indeed very fast compared to a full blown Spotlight search...

except it doesn't match on Apple's built-in applications like Calendar or Screenshot.app, which makes it useless to me since I don't mentally separate Apple Apps from third party ones when trying to find or search for apps.

Re: Can You Disable Spotlight and Siri in macOS Tahoe?

#73

Post by _23sd »

cormorant wrote: post #57
_23sd wrote: post #47

As hinted with the Finder comment, "Spotlight" is behind much more than the command-space search box. I don't know what the Siri services might do other than Siri itself, but wouldn't shock me if they were involved in things like Shortcuts and Control Center widgets. I understand thinking things you don't use are simply a "waste of CPU and storage space", but this reads like the kind of posts I used to see in the Win…

Howard Oakley has made more effort to understand what macOS is doing (and blog about it) than practically anyone else ever.

I'm sure, this post just came off as confused.

Re: Can You Disable Spotlight and Siri in macOS Tahoe?

#74

Post by analogpixel »

giantrobot wrote: post #60
analogpixel wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Store your files in a file structure that makes sense so you know where things are? I have never used Spotlight to find a file because I put files in sensible places.

I use Spotlight all the time to search for the contents of files. I don't memorize the contents and names of every file on my system, that's what my computer is for.

this is what grep is for. Why do I need a service constantly indexing my system and wasting resources for the few times a month I might need to run grep ?

what problem was really solved here?

Re: Can You Disable Spotlight and Siri in macOS Tahoe?

#75

Post by josephg »

_23sd wrote: post #47

As hinted with the Finder comment, "Spotlight" is behind much more than the command-space search box. I don't know what the Siri services might do other than Siri itself, but wouldn't shock me if they were involved in things like Shortcuts and Control Center widgets. I understand thinking things you don't use are simply a "waste of CPU and storage space", but this reads like the kind of posts I used to see in the Win…

If some process is going to take hours of cpu time, it should be opt in. At a minimum I’d like to be able to turn the bloody things off if I don’t want them.

I run cpu usage meters in my menu bar. The efficiency cores always seem busy doing one thing or another on modern macOS. It feels like Apple treats my e-cores as a playground for stupid features that their developers want a lot more than I do - like photoanalysisd, or file indexing to power spotlight, that hasn’t worked how I want it to for a decade.

I have a Linux workstation, and the difference in responsiveness is incredible. Linux feels like a breath of fresh air. On a technical level, my workstation cpu is barely any faster. But it idles at 0%. Whenever I issue a command, I feel like the computer has been waiting for me and then it springs to action immediately.

To your point, I don’t care why these random processes are using all my cpu. I just want them to stop. I paid good money for my Apple laptop. The computer is for me. I didn’t pay all that money so some Apple engineer can vomit all over with their crappy, inefficient code.

Re: Can You Disable Spotlight and Siri in macOS Tahoe?

#76

Post by Wowfunhappy »

zackmorris wrote: post #58

With nobody at Apple handling the engineering problem of implementing user requests, we're stuck with what we got. So I highly recommend App Tamer by St. Clair Software (no affiliation), which lets you set how much CPU percentage each process can use: https://stclairsoft.com/AppTamer/index.html It does cost $14.95 USD, but it's given me my computer back for years now. I have Spotlight Indexer set to 10%, although I'm…

Huh, I'm pretty surprised a tool like this is able to work with SIP enabled. Especially for system processes like Spotlight. I wonder how they did it.

Re: Can You Disable Spotlight and Siri in macOS Tahoe?

#77

Post by josephg »

giantrobot wrote: post #60
analogpixel wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Store your files in a file structure that makes sense so you know where things are? I have never used Spotlight to find a file because I put files in sensible places.

I use Spotlight all the time to search for the contents of files. I don't memorize the contents and names of every file on my system, that's what my computer is for.

I want spotlight to open applications and system settings. But full disk indexing makes spotlight basically useless for that, because its index is filled with crap. Instead of opening zed I accidentally open some random header file that’s sitting around in Xcode. It’s worse than useless. And that says nothing of the grotesque amount of cpu time spotlight wants to spend indexing all my files.

A feature I never wanted has ruined a feature I do want. It’s a complete own goal. In frustration I turned spotlight off completely a few months ago. Rip.

Re: Can You Disable Spotlight and Siri in macOS Tahoe?

#78

Post by josephg »

1718627440 wrote: post #26
pavel_lishin wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or `locate`, or mostly remembering where files live?

> Never in the past decade have I thought to myself, "gawrsh, I wonder where this file is on my laptop hard drive." I do, but 80% of the time I'm able to locate it by opening the directory where I would put it. And 10% it's in the "other" directory. And since I have the shell history, in the remaining case it is still a simple search.

I search for stuff all the time. But full disk search just never seems to solve the problems I have. Whatever keyword I’m looking for will inevitably show up in thousands of unrelated header files, Python files and JavaScript files in various node_modules directories and whatnot. Search in finder (or spotlight) is always way too noisy to actually do what I want it to do. Spending hours of cpu time to build that a useless index is deeply disrespectful.

Re: Can You Disable Spotlight and Siri in macOS Tahoe?

#79

Post by analogpixel »

josephg wrote: post #77
giantrobot wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Spotlight all the time to search for the contents of files. I don't memorize the contents and names of every file on my system, that's what my computer is for.

I want spotlight to open applications and system settings. But full disk indexing makes spotlight basically useless for that, because its index is filled with crap. Instead of opening zed I accidentally open some random header file that’s sitting around in Xcode. It’s worse than useless. And that says nothing of the grotesque amount of cpu time spotlight wants to spend indexing all my files. A feature I never wanted…

I think it's been said in this thread already, but it sounds like what you want is Alfred https://www.alfredapp.com/ it's a great app, use it every few minutes every day.

also, for opening apps, https://charmstone.app/ is pretty great.

Re: Can You Disable Spotlight and Siri in macOS Tahoe?

#80

Post by lizardking »

vosper wrote: post #35
kruuuder wrote: post #7

I understand the desire to disable Siri system-wide, but Spotlight? How else are you going to find your files? I'm often annoyed how slow/unreliable Spotlight is, especially in Mail, but what's the alternative here?

Spotlight is much improved in Tahoe - faster and with better results.

Seems worse and slower for me. YMMV
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