Ok, but how big can your catalog get before slowing QS to a crawl? 10k, 20K?Etienne Samson <mailto:[email protected]> March 5, 2013 10:27 AM1) Quicksilver predates Spotlight by a couple major OS Version, IIRC it was introduced under 10.1/10.2, and Spotlight came to life in 10.4. Guess who inspired who ;-).2) I personally *hate* Spotlight. Sometimes it just does brain dead things --- I've seen it happily jettison the entire volume index in case there no space left, leaving you to wait until the index is back up again while telling wrong times of "2 weeks before completion" (on a SSD where a full directory scan from the CLI takes less than 5 minutes, I find that doubtful).3) There's an automatic indexer, it's called the Catalog. It will reindex its contents (with some exceptions, see below) every 15 minutes by default, and *occasionally* hang completely ;-)).
Is this something QS currently listens to? If not would be cool to add this in and be able to specify it on an per indexer basis.4) There's a private flag called "watch" that listen to the FSEvents notifications (the ones sent by the file-system that Spotlight listen to to always keep it's index up to date). It's used for some of the "default" ones (like Documents, that one will get rescanned immediately if you create a file in it).
The only advantage I see to Spotlight is the ability to do queries on metadata, like "find all text files created the previous week". This is something Rob has provided a Catalog source for it, and it mostly works --- I say mostly because I've been able to beachball QS while using it, but don't ask me how, I don't remember ;-). For the 'automatic' thing, I think the FSEvents/"watch" way is the best : we don't rely on Spotlight (which breaks more often than not), and we're zippy since the indexing is done "in-house" at convenient times, in convenient locations, as specified in the Catalog.I don't use spotlight as my go to way to find files but it is *very* nice to be able to just start typing the name of the file i am looking for instead of first having to think of the folder its in and then drilling down to find the file.
Regards, Etienne Samson -- [email protected] Rob McBroom <mailto:[email protected]> March 5, 2013 9:32 AMOn Mar 4, 2013, at 11:54 PM, Tony <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:Is there any way to setup this up as a trigger. For example: - select a folder in the first pane - press trigger hotkey - automatically moves you to the last column - input filename and hit enter - display search resultsI tried using the Current Selection and Quicksilver Selection proxy objects with no luck?I would think Quicksilver Selection would be what you want, with "nothing" in the third pane. That is, hit ?X there when creating the trigger. But there's already a way to quickly select an action with a keystroke. If you train QS to bring up "Spotlight Filenames Matching..." by default for a single letter, like S, then you could select that action any time by hitting ??S from the first pane. Then ? would select the text in the third pane.But I just tried it and that action seems to crash Quicksilver, so maybe wait on that. :-)Btw, +100 to seeing the results appear as they come in as you suggested.Pie in the sky. It wouldn't be that hard from the plug-in's point of view, since that's how Spotlight wants to do things anyway, but the interfaces in Quicksilver aren't set up for that kind of thing, so there would have to be some fundamental changes in the app itself.Tbh i am somewhat surprised that the spotlight functionality is so clunkySome of that is my fault. First, I had no business messing with that plug-in. Someone with more experience needs to look at it. Any volunteers? Second, I really only care about the ability to add files to the catalog based on Spotlight query instead of filesystem location. The actions never seemed that useful to me (though I did a fair amount of work <https://github.com/quicksilver/Quicksilver/pull/804> to get the delayed results working correctly). I gave them a couple of quick tests, but never use them in real life.On the other hand, the plug-in wouldn't work /at all/ if it weren't for me, so I'm not beating myself up too much.given the power and potential it has and the fact that QS doesn't have an automatic indexer similar to other launchers.What do you mean by "automatic indexer"? Also, I'm not familiar with this term "other launchers". ;-) -- Rob McBroom <http://www.skurfer.com/> --You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Quicksilver" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/blacktree-quicksilver?hl=en.For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. Tony <mailto:[email protected]> March 4, 2013 11:54 PM Hey Rob, Is there any way to setup this up as a trigger. For example: - select a folder in the first pane - press trigger hotkey - automatically moves you to the last column - input filename and hit enter - display search resultsI tried using the Current Selection and Quicksilver Selection proxy objects with no luck?Btw, +100 to seeing the results appear as they come in as you suggested.Tbh i am somewhat surprised that the spotlight functionality is so clunky given the power and potential it has and the fact that QS doesn't have an automatic indexer similar to other launchers. Seems like a missed opportunity and would be awesome to see it enhanced.Rob McBroom <mailto:[email protected]> January 27, 2013 9:56 AM There's a way to do this, but it isn't completely obvious. Folder ? Spotlight Filenames Matching... ? search termYou can do this from any folder, including `/`, which would search the whole system.We should probably make the results appear as they come in, but that's not at the top if the list.Tony <mailto:[email protected]> January 26, 2013 6:18 PMIt just searches the file names as far as i can tell which is a sacrifice i would gladly make for the speed and convenience of being able to quickly find any file on my system *and* keep my catalog small.Would definitely recommend checking out Alfred to get some ideas. Nowhere near as powerful as QS but has some really cool ideas neverthelessRob McBroom <mailto:[email protected]> January 21, 2013 12:51 PMDoes this operate on file names or contents (or both)? I guess I could install it and see for myself, but that seems unlikely. :-)-- Rob McBroom <http://www.skurfer.com/> --You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Quicksilver" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/blacktree-quicksilver?hl=en.Tony <mailto:[email protected]> January 15, 2013 11:50 PMYea, thats what i feared the answer would be and its pretty much unusable in its current state. I have been dabbling with Alfred a little bit lately and they have a feature where you can find any file on your system. Im assuming its hooking into spotlight somehow and the results are instantaneous.I found it pretty addicting once you get used to it and it would be really cool to get something in QS as you could then dramatically cut down on the size of your catalog, greatly improving performance.Tony Rob McBroom <mailto:[email protected]> January 14, 2013 9:52 AM On Jan 13, 2013, at 1:17 PM, Tony<[email protected]> wrote:Just tried using the "Get Spotlight Results" action and its taking an extremely long time for the results to show up (~30secs). All the other spotlight actions that launch in the finder seem to be instantaneous. Is this behavior normal and is there any way to improve the performance?If you do a specific search, like `kMDItemKind == 'Application'`, it runs pretty quickly. When you just search for one or more words, it pieces together a query to (hopefully) do what Finder does, which is search file name, contents, and Spotlight comments. A search for "animal chin" will become kMDItemFSName LIKE[cd] 'animal chin*' || kMDItemFinderComment LIKE[cd] '*animal chin*' || kMDItemTextContent LIKE[cd] 'animal chin*' Whether or not it's using the right criteria is just a guess, and in any case, it appears to be very slow. I'm open to suggestions if anyone knows a faster way. Quicksilver will also wait until all results are found before showing any, but you can see in Finder that even *that* shouldn't take very long. So currently, the only way to speed things up is to be more specific. The syntax can be found athttps://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Carbon/Conceptual/SpotlightQuery/Concepts/QueryFormat.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40001849-CJBEJBHHAlso is there a reverse action for this action similar to the Google search action where i can have Spotlight in the first pane> Search For> Search Term?Not at the moment.
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