[OS X TeX] status of Spotlight indexing of .tex files?

[Herbert Schulz]

On Dec 7, 2005, at 3:16 AM, Jan Hegewald wrote:

>
> spotlight search appears to be very odd, e.g. the search for  
> filenames only works for special cases: consider a file  
> newTest.tex. If you type newT in the spotlight search it is found  
> but if you type ewT it is not found change your search to Test and  
> it´s found again (at least on my system). This seems very strange  
> to me and makes spotlight nearly useless for me as I can not rely  
> on it.
>

Howdy,

I believe there has to be some ``word delimiter'' for spotlight to  
find the ``word'' otherwise you could get into terrible messes. I  
think the old Find File needed the start of the file name too; it  
wouldn't match anything form the middle of the file name. So that  
behavior seems to be the same.

I use Locator (a front end to locate, which uses the locate data base  
- updated once weekly on my system) if I need to find a file in a  
different fashion. You could try Easy Find too.

Using SpotlightIndexer (a front end to mdimport) on directories  
(recursive) that don't change rapidly (e.g., /usr/local/teTeX/)  
allows me to find files within places that Sporlight usually ignores;  
make sure to use the Force preference option.

Good Luck,

Herb Schulz
(herbs at wideopenwest.com)


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