Spotlight

“Spotlight was really good on Tiger”

“made it function worse for what I used it for, and uses 30GiB of already very scarce disk space”

“The new spotlight search (from Siri) is amazing and super convenient.”

“I'm normally doing string searches for file contents or names which it handles perfectly fine.”

“Spotlight handles searches like that just fine”

“The process that shows the Spotlight UI is now the one called "Siri", previously it was called "Spotlight".”

“Spotlight remains the best local search but it falls apart with disk space limits.”

“Spotlight works for me across files and apps on Mac, iOS, visionOS, pretty well”

“For me it's gotten way better in iOS/macOS 27. It's also way faster.”

“new delayed results would steal highlight focus so hitting the enter button to select something from the list became a lottery”

“It can access any of my applications, or even any of my files simply by hearing the name”

“sometimes text input is a superior UX than using any UI - like Spotlight search or git CLI”

“it has become really buggy in recent years, filling my disk with garbage and often using a lot of CPU on its indexing threads”

“sometimes, when you get it to do what you want, some system update will force a reindex and you are back to square one”

“Spotlight search is completely broken. If I type "sa" the first result is Safari but if I type "safa" I get "Adguard for Safari.app".”

“I can find a pdf of the TTRPG I'm playing that's hidden deep in an iCloud drive by simply opening spotlight”

“Typing is much faster than moving your cursor to a small target like a menu bar item.”

“Spotlight gets me everything I'd need from there.”

“My Spotlight was shit. I disabled types of searches that I never used and rebuilt its index. Now it's working as intended.”

“It's broken. Spotlight used to work almost perfectly since it was introduced and it's been lagging and somewhat defunct since Tahoe.”

“Spotlight works well when you know what you are looking for”

“Spotlight and Mission Control (and the dock) being separate is good”

“Still clearly superior to the Windows Search/keyboard-based app launching experience”

“my anecdata is that cmd+space works perfectly fine”

“Spotlight, aside from failing to find applications also pollutes the search results with random files”

“it takes ~4 seconds on my M4 laptop to search the sqlite database for it and return that entry.”

“It's really convenient: Command+Space, then just type the expression into the search box.”

“Spotlight works great for me but the index can occasionally become corrupted.”

“Spotlight search is infinitely more useful than the Windows 10+ start menu.”

“Spotlight has been a pretty good local search for nearly twenty years”

“it doesn't match on Apple's built-in applications like Calendar or Screenshot.app, which makes it useless to me”

“I use Spotlight all the time to search for the contents of files.”

“It seems to sort programs by frequency, so it knows that I open Ghostty far more often than Ghostery”

“now that causes the screen to freeze for half a second and then the colour wheel spins for a couple of seconds”

“There is absolutely no advantage to anything offered now over Spotlight”

“Spotlight's improvement is quite nice.”

“the new spotlight search is one of the better features of Tahoe”

“there's tons of delay introduced and results change under your finger as you're selecting them”

“I think it was pretty much day 1 that I encountered an app that just refused to show up in the Spotlight replacement”

“I've found Spotlight awesome since switching to an iPhone last year.”