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

[Norm Gall]

On 20-Dec-05, at 12:02 PM, Adam Maxwell wrote:

>
> On Tuesday, December 20, 2005, at 09:50AM, Jan Hegewald  
> <rurapente at gmx.de> wrote:
>>
>> But currently Spotlight does not tell my which files and
>> folders are not indexed. So I can not determine if important files
>> are excluded.
>
> I think part of the anti-Spotlight sentiment around here is due to  
> misunderstanding about what it's supposed to do (probably due in  
> part to Apple's hype).  See <http://developer.apple.com/ 
> documentation/Carbon/Conceptual/MetadataIntro/index.html>, which  
> talks about "Metadata."  File content as raw text is recognized as  
> a metadata tag, but it's mainly a catch-all when nothing else works  
> (e.g. DVI files have no other metadata information available AFAIK,  
> such as author, title, date).
>
> In reference to Herb's comment, it is good that not all text files  
> are indexed the same; this allows BibTeX files to be imported  
> differently than TeX documents, or html documents.  The implicit  
> requirement is for application developers to ship an importer for  
> the file types they support, though, or else Spotlight breaks down.

There is also a certain lack of willingness to do a little research  
to find things out.

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=301533 tells you  
_exactly_ what folders are searched by Spotlight by default:

Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger features Spotlight, a lightning-fast search  
technology that instantly lets you find things on your Mac. By  
default, Spotlight will index and search in the following locations:

     * All Home folders (local and network-based, as well as  
FileVault and non-FileVault). This includes:
           o The Documents, Movies, Music, and Pictures folders
           o ~/Library/Metadata/
           o ~/Library/Caches/Metadata/
           o ~/Library/Mail/
           o ~/Library/Caches/com.apple.AddressBook/Metadata/
           o ~/Library/PreferencePanes/

     * Spotlight also searches these non-Home folder locations by  
default:
           o /Library/PreferencePanes/
           o /System/Library/PreferencePanes/
           o /Applications

I think that this is pretty clear and was found by typing "Where does  
Spotlight search" in Google; it is the first return.

Overriding these defaults is trivial with SpotlightIndexer and  
marginally less trivial with the Terminal.

ng

-- 
I would rather have a mind opened by wonder than one closed by belief.
Gerry Spence
How to Argue and Win Every Time, 1995


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