Spotless - Gain some control over Spotlight
Oct 10, '05 06:57:00AM
Contributed by: robg
The macosxhints Rating:

[Score: 9 out of 10]
Spotless is a simple little app that gives you a bit more control over OS X 10'4s Spotblight, er, Spotlight, feature. As you all probably know, Spotlight indexes your hard drives, theoretically making it easy to find everything on your machine. Personally, I don't use it much, as I find it's lack of easy-to-access boolean functions quite limiting. However, it has come in handy a couple of times when looking for a few obscure files on my machine, so I let it keep indexing my drives.
Despite my settings to the contrary in the Spotlight Privacy tab, however, Spotlight insists on re-indexing my two backup FireWire drives every time I reconnect them. This means that every search I run finds three (nearly identical) copies of every hit. Arghhh! This same glitch seemingly hit Dan Frakes, so he went solution hunting and found Spotless -- his full-blown writeup goes into great detail on the program and its features. Here's my exeuctive summary version:
Spotless will let you easily and permanently disable Spotlight indexing on any drive -- even if you move that drive to another machine after disabling indexing, Spotlight will still leave it alone. You can also turn off Spotlight completely, if you wish, and delete individual index files from each of your drives. I love it; I turned off my backup drives indexing, trashed their indexes, and then re-mounted them -- as promised, Spotlight is no longer indexing or searching those drives; hooray! This aggravation-saver is well worth $7.95, in my opinion (though I hope a future OS X update resolves the removable-drive issue, and gives us eaasier boolean searches!)
As an aside, I noted in last week's pick that I'm now working with the Mac Gems column at Macworld. Some picks, like Textpander last week, will be mine, and I'll do a longer writeup on Mac Gems. Others, like this one, will come from apps I've read about on Mac Gems. In both cases, I'll include a link to the longer Mac Gems article...
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Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20051010065731886