Things that are hard: launching a terminal at a location, viewing or copying a files path, navigating a deep file system, column width in the column view, searching for files, finding file info, and lots of other.
except Excel's ribbon menu items. As far as I know there's no method to hotkey those like ALT+[<letter>] on windows. Same for Outlook's categorize email function.
Of all four, searching for files on a Mac is a dream.
Apple Spotlight is and always has been lightyears ahead of whatever garbage Microsoft use on Windows.
And don't get me started on the inconvenience of searching for files on Linux or BSD, I mean, for starters you have to download a non-default tool like `fd` if you want to search at any reasonable speed.
This just tells me you've never used they only file search dream - Everything search, unfortunately Windows only. Spotlight has never come close to that
> Apple Spotlight is and always has been lightyears ahead of whatever garbage Microsoft use on Windows.
I certainly agree on that, and I also find it more convenient than the desktop search options I’ve tried on Linux (there I usually drop to the command line to search).
But despite really wanting to like Spotlight, e.g. its integration with Apple Mail with email previews is great, I find it unusable for heavy work. I’ve tried customizing it to disable lots of search backends that I don’t need, but still for reasons I don’t understand, it sometimes takes 5+ seconds to process my search results before showing anything, and even the average search often takes a second and is not well-sorted.
In comparison, Alfred is always instant at searching on my computer, and I really prefer how you can explicitly tell it what you are searching for (e.g. `'filename`, `in file contents`, `=math`, etc.) whereas Spotlight tries to guess this and often guesses wrong. It’s also easier to customize if you want to integrate e.g. specific web searches in it.
I’ve tried Raycast since lots of people praise it, but I still find Alfred to have a nicer and more responsive interface, but perhaps it’s just what I’m used to.
I think something is wrong with your Spotlight index if it takes that long. Recently something went a bit funny with my Spotlight that made it take as long as you're describing, but after a reboot it's pretty instantaneous as usual. I work with large numbers of files (tens of thousands per project, with about 40-50 projects) so I don't think it can be that. I'm pretty sure there are ways to rebuild your Spotlight index.
I haven't come across issues with ordering, but my use cases are usually pretty simple, so that might be down to a difference in our workflows.
Searching on my SMB network share doesn't work. At all. It's not just that Spotlight won't index it. It's that you can't even search by filename within the current folder you're viewing.
A workaround for this (especially if you have a terminal always open) is to drag the file/folder you want to operate on into an open terminal window, which will paste in its path.
This is what I do as well. Note that nearly every MacOS app shows a file or folder icon in its title bar if you hover the mouse over it – this icon can be dragged into a terminal to open the current file or folder there. Also useful if I e.g. want to grep something in a currently open text file in the terminal, or something like that.
(There is a system setting to always show this in the title bar without hovering, which was the old default behavior before Big Sur if I recall correctly. I’m a bit annoyed that it’s now hidden away by default.)
