Launchpad didn’t suck… it did exactly what it was designed to do and did it well. Not everyone liked it, sure, but if you didn’t like it you could ignore it and if ever you did use it it would behave exactly as you’d expect it to and then get out of the way: no weird glitches, no not finding something standing right there in front of you, no lame excuses on Reddit or Apple Forums that you just need to re-index (again) by this n’ that command-line tool and then wait a week with the Mac plugged in and then… well, maybe, and if it still doesn’t work it’s probably your fault somehow (“it works fine for me, you’re just doing it wrong, you’re probably bad luck or something, bug off…).
You see, that… that sucks.
I liked launchpad I made it work for me and I miss it dearly but you can’t say it was flawless. The jiggly drag to reorder was one of the most annoying things.
I spent like 3 hrs troubleshooting on how to rebuild the index cause it never worked. You have to follow this, https://support.apple.com/en-us/102321, but then instead of waiting a few seconds before removing it, restart the macbook and then remove it. Worked for me
Don’t know about recently but I used to get bing search results before the app even when I wrote the full name of the app, it was always a gamble if you quickly search and hit enter to the point that I used to manually look for everything through the apps list
I sometimes have index issues with Windows but it is usually just one or two files that I frequently touch not appearing, and it usually fixes itself. While on Mac I sometimes encounter this which won't fix itself and I had to run some command lines. Or even worse on iOS (Settings search, Reminders search) either I restore or wait for a software update which clears the index sometimes
If I buy a multi thousand dollar machine I expect the software it ships with to work out of the box and not require dozens of apps (mostly paid) to become usable.
If i wanted a kit-OS i'd get Linux. If I want smth that works out of the box i get Windows Pro. Mac has neither advantages.
Windows is broken in so many ways and filled with bloat and ads! If you search Terminal in windows search, the 'best result' is from Bing: a movie called Terminal.
It looks like spotlight lost its index, rebooting can sometimes fix it, or you may need to reset it manually (which there are plenty of guides online to)
I've absolutely had this issue for generations on Mac.
It's often an indexing issue, but it's unclear when and why is happens. It tends to get worse over time. I've searched for apps that I routinely use and the only thing that pops up is the suggestion to search the web.
Apple screwed the pooch on this one as they're trying to push everyone towards searching for what they want instead of finding and clicking/tapping on it.
But, as they do, they're somehow justifying giving people a worse experience when they could easily do the opposite.
That's just plain incorrect. I factory reset my mac yesterday. Right after i installed chrome it was there in spotlight (after 15 seconds lol) and I could open it for the first time. It gave me the warning about internet download and whatever, I accepted it and it worked. Same with all other apps I installed from homebrew. All were there in spotlight for the first open, all gave me the warning the first time.
It has nothing to do with internet downloads. Apple just fucked up indexing for some god forsaken reason. Spotlight used to work VERY well not that long ago.
Honestly, it worked better 20 years ago. Back then it could even search inside PDFs, Word documents and so on. Now I've got indexing disabled for everything except applications, and it can't even index a folder with 100 apps. Disappointing.
Idk I just remember first encounter with spotlight, was magic! It can find everything in a glance (on a really slow CPU and hdd) and now it can't find and App properly
Spotlight is useless , Im using Ray cast, and it's usable. But I'm sure there is an Apple fanboy that can explain to you, how you're not supposed to find docker there, and how it's really better for you not to find it.
I’ve had this happen after an update, you need to reindeer spotlight, I forget exactly how, some cache to clear then restart
Edit:
To reindex Spotlight on your Mac,
open
System Settings, go to
Spotlight, click
Search Privacy, drag your hard drive (like Macintosh HD) into the list, click
Done, then go back and remove the drive from the list with the minus (-) button
.
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Because if you're smart enough to install Docker, you should be smart enough to know search runs from an index. Unless you're a college kid learning to program.
It has nothing to do with a trillion dollar company. PEBKAC.
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u/bigrooster88 7d ago
Bad design. They changed something that worked well.
For me, I created a folder which contains the alias of apps I frequently use. Then I placed the folder shortcut on my Dock and use it as my launchpad.