Could OSX’s Spotlight Suck More? Doubt It

There was a post about a week ago about how new computer science students don’t get the Unix philosophy and the power (and great responsibility) of the command line. I don’t know these people. Most of my dev time is between Emacs, a terminal, and a web browser.

But during this discussion, or maybe in the article itself, there was an argument along the lines of: kids don’t need to learn how to use find or locate when they have Spotlight, and I nodded along, swallowing this like so much bad medicine.

Until, just moments ago, I went to open up Google Chrome and was like, hey, I’ll just use Spotlight to do it. So I tried. And I waited, and then waited a bit more, and remembered: oh, right, Spotlight is a piece of shit that never actually manages to find anything. Need to search for something? Oh, too bad, out of commission, I’m busy indexing your entire machine for the one hundredth time today and, surprise, this breaks the entire utility.

(Googling around seems to reveal this as an OS X bug fixed in a more recent update. No doubt that introduces more bugs and the Sisyphean cycle continues.)