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Comment by taylodl | Hacker News Reader

My biggest Mac OS annoyances:

1. Why can't windows remember their positions when using multiple screens? Is it a bug in the OS or a bug in the App (because some apps seem to work better than others?)

2. Why does Finder search suck so bad? I generally find it easier to drop to a command line and use 'find' rather than use Finder. Finder in general kinda sucks.

3. Why doesn't the Always Open With option on the Other... submenu seem to work?

4. Why does Exposé not work half the time? I have many applications with many windows open for each. I don't want to use Mission Control to select the window, I want to use Exposé. Half the time Exposé just gives me the desktop. Not what I want.

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#2 this doesn’t solve the problem, but IMO changing the default from “search everywhere” to “search in this folder” helps quite a bit.

#3 I think that only applies to the current file, not its type. Use the info pop up for that.

#4 generally seems to be linked to certain apps creating windows in “unusual” ways. Quit apps till the culprit is found.

(In case it’s unclear: not defending the design choices, just suggesting.)

For 2), it’s because Finder only ever looks for things indexed by Spotlight. So it could be Spotlight lagging behind (that’s the ‘mdworker’ I’m sure you’ve seen many times hogging cpu), the Spotlight importer for that file type failing, or even just Spotlight deciding not to index various folders by default :( Off the top of my head I don’t remember exact folders it ignores, but it definitely does not index the full file system.

Spotlight going out of its mind indexing is my current annoyance. mds and mdworker processes taking up 100% of my CPU for hours on end, blasting hot air into my already hot home office. I have a screenshot of 30+ mdworker_shared processes simultaneously doing god knows what, roasting my CPU. Nothing I do seems to help, including limiting spotlight to specific folders, disabling it for certain volumes from the command line, there's just no way tell Spotlight to not melt my CPU without turning off the service altogether. Total madness and it's an opaque black box.

#3 is super annoying - but also why can't I bulk edit associations?

Parallels decided to install Windows Media Player as my media player for all music and video file types on macOS and I want to reset all of them to VLC.

> #3 is super annoying - but also why can't I bulk edit associations?

You can.

Right Click -> Open With -> Other... (Always open with checkbox)

is for setting a particular association for the particular file you right-clicked (maybe you always want this file to open in Sublime, but this other one with the same extension in TextEdit, for some reason, etc).

command-I to open the Get Info pane -> expand Open With block -> use dropdown labelled "Use this application to open all documents like this one" -> click Change All... button

is the bulk edit flow

That's not really what I mean by "bulk editing."

On Windows you can do things like set an application for all media files. Or choose which file types that VLC supports that it should open.

On macOS you have to modify every single file type by hand - which also requires a file of that type to operate on. It should be in System Preferences instead.

Select multiple files with different extensions > hold [Control] and right click > Get Summary Info > Open with (select all) > click [Change All...].

The files don't need to be valid, just have the extension you want to associate, so you can do something like `touch _.mp3 _.mp4 _.m4a _.mkv` then select those files and set them all at once.

There’s this old school system pref extension that does exactly this.

https://www.rubicode.com/Software/RCDefaultApp/

I don't bother with Exposé, I disabled its shortcuts and use AltTab [0] instead. 90% of the time I just want to swap between the last two recently used windows and that makes it incredibly easy.

[0] https://alt-tab-macos.netlify.app/

Yeah even spotlight search sucks these days. When it first came out in Tiger or so it worked great. Now it's slow and it never finds what I'm looking for even if I type the exact name.

That's too bad. Spotlight was fantastic then. Its ability to search for applications, file names, tags you set on files and inside the content of files was so incredibly convenient.

Windows 7 also had a fantastic search mechanism in its Start Menu (although it came 4 years after Tiger's Spotlight) that has since been broken in Windows 8 and 10 for reasons unknown.

Not to deny your experience and I’m sure that it is giving you problems, but I never have problems finding things with spotlight and the finder search. The files almost always come right up. the only thing I don’t like is when it has displayed a result and then it adds a late addition in place of the item that I was just about to click on. I’d rather it wait to display results until it had the full set.

I do configure Finder to start its search in the current folder because that is usually where I want to start searching for a file and I want to limit the number of possible false positives. It’s easy to expand the search if needed.

I have heard of people who force Spotlight to reindex their drive if they are having trouble with getting results. Have you tried doing that?

I've tried reindexing yeah but it still does it.

I normally run spotlight from the looking glass icon in the menu bar so there is no 'current folder'. What happens is that it turns up a whole ton of XML files, dat file etc instead of the files I'm looking for. They appear only later and at the end.

In the beginning it had much more sense to keep that stuff out. And yeah I can exclude folders but I don't really want to have to micromanage that stuff. The whole point of Spotlight was not having to do that.

#2 - type 'man locate'

It'll change your life when it comes to searching on your local machine. Mind you just for files. It does not index tags nor metadata.

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