The new spotlight search replaced what I previously used, made it function worse for what I used it for, and uses 30GiB of already very scarce disk space.

For many users, it is a strict downgrade that was forced on them against their consent.

How was it "against their consent?" The Siri AI / Apple Intelligence feature required a user to explicitly enable it. It didn't just get enabled for you.

I know this because I just explicitly enabled it, and now I have the new Spotlight search. I didn't have it before I enabled it.

No, this is downloaded and installed upon installation of MacOS 27. The 30 GiB of "Apple Intelligence" is sitting on my disk against my consent. I've even taken pains to do all of the hacks (save for the novel one in this repo) to disable Siri AI.

I never asked for it, I had to disable it

I don’t want to make my search more ambiguous. That is the opposite of what I want.

The existing search on macOS was almost completely useless to be fair

Spotlight search has sucked from Day 1 of OSX. You need to use Find Any File [0] or some equivalent tool if you want to search the actual file system without being limited by Spotlight's never-properly-updated "index."

The functionality of Find Any File was built in to Mac OS 9 and earlier. It was rock-solid reliable. So of course Apple removed it and now to get reliable search you have to use a third-party tool. Or 'find' in the Terminal.

[0] https://findanyfile.app/

I desperately need something like Everything¹ for macOS!

¹https://www.voidtools.com/

Find Any File is solid, but it scans on demand, so it never quite feels like Everything. The closest I've found is Cling from lowtechguys: it keeps its own index of the whole disk, including the hidden files and app data Spotlight skips, and results show up as you type with fuzzy matching.

Thanks for the heads-up!

This is why I rip out spotlight on my mac and replace it with FZF

Would you have a guide? Particularly on the rip out part. Fzf is no nice unless you trigger it on a dir too big (e.g. your entire home).

I also resort to

  cd / && rg --no-messages --files | rg "name"

Spotlight was really good on Tiger idkwym

Can it now consistently find things in /Applications when I type the full name?

That's revolutionary.

No.

I made my own “pseudo spotlight” and mapped it to ⌘-Space specifically for this. It just goes against old fashioned locate/updatedb, but with a very quick check against /Applications first + running the search query through bc and if it’s valid syntax, showing the math result.

Yeah in macOS 27 it's finally been really good about prioritizing the Applications folder, including with indexing, apps show up in search now right after you installed them

You’re missing the entire new world of personal context retrieval.

How so?

Just because something is convenient or necessary for you, it doesn't mean it is convenient or necessary for everyone