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Comment by hbn | Hacker News Reader

FYI - there's a quicker way to relaunch Finder: hold option and right click the Finder icon in your dock, and there will be a new "Relaunch" item at the bottom of the menu

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defaults write com.apple.finder QuitMenuItem -bool YES

i actually keep finder off (force-quit via activity monitor) until i need it, preferring to use spotlight for simple file finding. it otherwise uses not only too much memory but also too much cpu time (and hence battery).

Finder just relaunches when you force quit it in Activity Monitor? Is there something else you had to do to get it to not relaunch?

Also, I'm not sure how much you are saving by doing that. My Finder uses 0% CPU when not being actively used.

mine doesn't relaunch, but i honestly don't remember how i changed that behavior, sorry!

dunno why, but my finder uses 2-5% constantly when running, and spawns a bunch of other processes (like mdworker) as well, which also suck away battery. better to keep it off for me.

mdworker is what keeps your simple Spotlight file search working ツ

well yes (and also for backing up i believe), but at least for me, there aren't tons of files that i care about which change often, so i don't need it constantly going off and cataloging the latest homebrew updates or whatever.

You can exclude opt and any other directories full of frequently changing files you don't care about spotlight indexing.

ah yes, i should look into doing that.

Why isn't that the default?

I think that it doesn't work in Monterey

I just tried it. The menu item was there, although I didn't click it.

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