OS X V10.6 Snow Leopard :: Spotlight Can't Find TextEdit, Other Apps Found Ok
Apr 3, 2012
I have a very odd problem. Spotlight can't find TextEdit anymore, even if I type the name of the app fully in the field. The app is right where it should be in the Applications folder. It hasn't been excluded from search and I have done a reindex of Spotlight but the problem persists. Other apps come up exactly right.
I'm using OSX Snow Leopard. Spotlight was unable to find a document in a folder. It found several others that have almost the same name, but not the one I was looking for. By scrolling down in the finder window I found it without spotlight right away.
To better explain my problem:
I was looking for a document that was called "Paperless". Spotlight found several document in different folders like "Paperlessone", Paperless2" etc. But not able to find "Paperless"
I checked the Spotlight options and it says, that it is looking for everything.
I recently upgraded to OX 10.6.8 (MacBook Pro). Now Quark Xpress and Microsoft Word can't find the fonts. They both see the same list of fonts. The fonts are all windows true type fonts (.ttf). The list of fonts available does not include all the .ttf fonts in the library. There is no font folder anywhere that has only the fonts that these two apps see in it. The apple apps I tested see all the fonts in the library. How do I make the fonts available to the non-apple applications?
I have been happily using TextEdit to write text in Roman and Arabic script for the last few months. Today, without warning, TextEdit quit unexpectedly while I was half-way through writing a document.
I'm running OS 10.6.8, TextEdit v 1.6 (264) and find that documents created in TextEdit and saved with a custom scale (90% for example) and then closed always revert to 100% when opened the next time. The funny thing is when I close the document after changing the scale without saving it prompts me to save the changes, but even then it's not saved. So I'm thinking this behavior isn't normal, TextEdit knows it's supposed to be saving this but for whatever reason it's not. This is more in the category of a nuisance than a problem but I thought I'd post and see if anyone knows anything about this.
Info: MacPro 2.66QCX 4x2G X25-M 4xWDC; 17" MBP, Mac OS X (10.6.2), XPSp2
If I had to pick one thing that is a fundamental feature of the OS, not just Mac OS but any OS, it's the ability to find files - and that functionality is all but completely broken in Leopard. Spotlight in Leopard absolutely sucks. It doesn't find files, it's slow, and there are few options for how to sort found files.
I can't count the number of times that I have tried using it to quickly locate a file, but it can't find it, even thought it's right there on my hard drive. I manually navigate to the file, and yep, I spelled it right...there it is. But it just doesn't appear in the Spotlight results list.
One of the biggest gripes i have with Leopard is Spotlight. I have a 4gb usb drive i put mp3s on to listen to in my car and every time i plug it in Spotlight starts indexing it which means i get stuck with slower read/write speeds until it is done. Is there any way in 10.6 to turn off Spotlight for external drives?
I've been using happily Snow Leopard for a couple of weeks now but last night it just started freezing. Everytime I open Spotlight and look for something I see the spinning beachball... the mouse still works but NOTHING else does (Dock, menus, Finder)... everything just freezes.
When using spotlight I set my preferences so it doesn't find music and some other things. It works great for the spotlight popup, but in windowed mode, which searches "this mac", still searches for everything. Is there a way to get the windowed mode to only search the things I specified in spotlight?
Earlier I posted a problem about the get info pane has something wrong in it, that the "more info" only shows the headline, while other things, like dimensions for the pictures, the bitrate of MP3 songs, etc.
When I select a font in TextEdit, it doesn't show what the font looks like; they all appear with the same, generic font. It does this in a few other apps too. In the Mac version of MS Office this doesn't happen. Is there a simple way to fix this as I'm appalling at remembering what a font looks like with just the name of it in front of me!
you can't sort your spotlight results by size unless you are in Icon view. How did they leave that out of List view? That is the only feature I'd hoped would be introduced in SL. It makes Spotlight searches as useless as they were in 10.5.
The search integration of Spotlight with TextEdit: Typing in a search term in Spotlight, then opening one of the resulting files in TextEdit, then choosing Find in TextEdit used to immediately bring up the very same search term from Spotlight, so that you wouldn't have to type the very same (potentially very long) term all over again to go straight to the spot in the file.
Spotlight has been indexing for four days now,; all it says is 'estimating indexing time.' Meanwhile, i can't search for anythign on my hard drive. how can i make it stop?
The problem I am having is that my spotlight runs fine and then after a period of using my imac (2 hours) the searches take longer and longer to do. This happens when I am searching using a window. So by holding the alt cmd space bar and then keying in my keywords.
If i search by going to the magnifying glass in the menu bar it searches as normal but then clicking on show all results its back to being slow. If I reboot the mac it continues to run fast and then eventually goes slow. I have tried rebuilding the spotlight databases but this has not helped.
You know how you can calculate numbers in spotlight? It used to give me the answers but now it just says no results found. Oh and I enabled the calculator via the terminal command that I found through this and restarted but still doesn't do calculations
"More from the irresponsible speculation department.. but IMHO more logically reasoned in this instance: Leander Kahney over at Cult of Mac just found a ridiculously huge virtual keyboard in Snow Leopard.
Located in System Preferences, it serves the same function as it did under Leopard, but is much larger. There's no reason I can think of why one would need a huge virtual keyboard just to show them what happens when you press the option key.
I find this fairly persuasive evidence of hooks being set in the OS for a touchscreen Mac, though I am aware of my bias, being on record as an iTablet fanboi. So take this, as every piece of speculation, with a grain of salt."
I have a Konica Minolta Bizhub C350 (photocopier/printer). It connects via network to my airport express. All five of my Macs found it using Bonjour under Leopard.
I installed Snow Leopard on all five Macs, and now, none of them have the printer in their list of available printers. This is an older printer, however far too expensive to replace.
Any idea of how to get Snow Leopard to discover it again? I noticed that when I click on the printer preferences, and attempt to add it again, there isn't even a Bonjour option.
An odd problem that has recurred on two of the installations of Snow Leopard I've had on my 27" iMac is that for some odd reason, using Spotlight will cause a slow system death.
I've had Snow Leopard since the day it came out. And I installed it that same day. Since then Spotlight is constantly indexing and will not stop. I noticed about a week after installation when I went to use stoplight and it wouldn't let me because it was indexing. Now fast forward to today I still haven't fixed this problem because I never really needed to use it. So no I have the need, and I need to fix this problem. BTW I'm using a 13" aluminum Mac Book bought around June '09 the model right before the current 13" aluminum Mac Book Pro's
It's actually one of five partions on the external drive, and the only one with a problem. Two of the other four are nicely on the Privacy List, and the other two are both indexed and kept nicely up to date. But the Fifth cannot be indexed, although it once was partially. I have run Spotless, which lists all other drives just as I expect but for this one it reports: "The Metadata Server is reporting that content indexing is DISABLED for the volume Fifth but the volume itself is reporting that the content indexing status is set to ENABLED." It is possible to find an 8Kb index on the volume, then Trash and delete it; Spotlight immediately re-creates another index-in-waiting but does not actually do the indexing or add anything in the folder. An added frustration is that the 'folder' is both invisible, locked and seems to be without 'ownership' or other conventional attributes.
1) I have done the primitive Add to Privacy and Remove Dance nothing has changed.
2) I have used Terminal, deleted all .Spotlight-V100 indexes, disabled Spotlight rebooted, renabled it and rebooted—nothing has changed. This included carefully following steps in other posters' accounts (some failed, some succeeded) and a site that gave a particularly thorough version.
3) I have used Spotless although it offers to do such things as Delete the empty index and re-start Indxing, it then reports it couldn't due to an unexpected error.
4) Some folks have pointed to another faulty invisible file variously naming it '.metadate_never_index' and '.metadataneverindex', to be found in '.hostconfig' or eleswhere at the root and destroyed, but I never didscovered anything like it. I did perhaps succeed in adding the line: SPOTLIGHT=-YES- to that file, based on another bit of advice, but it seems to have had no effect.
The terrible irony is that I use FindAnyFile and good ol' FileBuddy for all my searching. All I want is to 'Show Item Info' in Finder's View Options. Wouldn't you know that needs the Spotlight 'app'.Assuming the Spotless message is accurate, I need to convince the MetadataServer that indexing for that partition is enabled. How do I do that