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Comment by ksherlock | Hacker News Reader

Mac OS spotlight has more-or-less instant file search. Command-F in finder or mdfind in the terminal.

Except it's neither instant nor comprehensive, and those two features are what make Everything awesome

I think you never actually used the mdfind search, only the bastardized version that is now available as Spotlight. That interface used to be good, now it’s so bad and slow I don’t know why they let this happen. But try mdfind with filenames, it is incredibly fast. Also for file content searches it is very fast also.

I tried a quick search between mdfind, bfs, and find to locate all README.md files in my home directory. bfs and find both found 2930 files and took 8.5s and 47.5s respectively. mdfind took 0.1s but found only 2400 files.

so what's the query to find a file anywhere on my hard drive, including hidden folders/files?

I don’t know what problems people have with Spotlight. It finds everything instantly for me. It’s my launcher, calculator…

For starters, it hides system files by default.

I think that’s a good default.

Most people don’t need to be messing with system files, the ones who do, can go through the extra trouble of checking a few preferences, using command line tools, setting up plist flags, etc.

Oh so you do know what problems people have with Spotlight, you just don't care about those problems to offer anything useful (your generic list isn't that since there are no preferences, cli tools, plist flags that would bring Everything to life on a Mac)

No, I learned from this problem just now and think most users shouldn’t be messing with Library folder, etc, which is why it is hidden, and rightly so, IMO.

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