To add some actual numbers to the discussion, I benchmarked such a directory-blacklist filter on my ancient Mac Pro (this is running on one 2.8 GHz core): On the other hand, these other apps don't look anywhere near as good, and can be a pig to set upĬhecking every result to see if its path starts with the path of an excluded folder or ends with an excluded extension is a very trivial operation. I know applications similar to Alfred don't share its shortcomings (difficult to control inclusions/exclusions doesn't deal with networked drives) because they build and maintain their own indexes. Most of the work (updating, indexing etc.) is handled for you, but the cost is flexibility. I think this is one of the tradeoffs with using Spotlight. I'd like some way to exclude '*.ico' or 'fav.*' from the default results. If I type 'fav' then I'd rather not have every fav.ico file show up in the search. The problem is that this isn't necessarily related to just workflows the search results in general can be overly broad. I have filters for searching for ONLY folders, bookmarks, mail, chat, etc because I know when I'm looking for those things. For instance, my defaults are to only show contacts, preferences and applications in results. I use workflows and filters to drastically reduce results to match exactly what I want. I know if I'm looking for a picture, or a folder, or if I want to look in a specific folder that I work in frequently. I personally don't want EVERY type of file/folder in my search results because I typically know what I'm looking for. A lot of people think it's better to just add lower level folders to the scope so that Alfred searches everything but it affects performance and just clutters your results to the point that you have so much in your search results that you can't find what you were actually looking for. While this may sound like its not a big deal and seem like something that would be easily done, the downside is that it would affect performance since Alfred would have to go back and touch every result to determine if it matched the excludes.Īlternatively, I would suggest looking at your workflow and see how you can create filters to narrow down things. In order to add this functionality, Alfred would have to query and then go back and parse every result to determine if it matched the user excludes and then remove them. The problem with doing something like this is that, since Alfred uses the internal metadata server for queries, there is no "exclude this location" option for that except for including it in the privacy section of Spotlight preferences which is currently the recommended method of excluding locations. ico files showing up in the results, which I don't really need. The problem is compounded by Alfred only displaying a limited number of results: you don't even get the chance to train it to associate a certain file with a keyword because the file never makes it into the list of search results. If that isn't enough work, you need to update your file filter every time you add a new folder or new type of file. But without blacklisting, you're forced to explicitly include every folder/filetype but the ones you want to ignore. Perhaps you want to use a file filter to search all filetypes or subdirectories bar one or two. Perhaps you want to include a directory in Alfred's global search, but exclude it from a specific file filter. It would be pretty simple to fix that with a global blacklist, but it's literally impossible without. There are many situations where Alfred's whitelist approach is a PITA or useless compared to a blacklist approach.įor example, I have a lot of source code, which I regularly search using Spotlight, but don't want showing up in Alfred. In many cases, this is not a viable option. This works well most of the time, but as a result, the only way to exclude files/folders from Alfred's results is to use Spotlight's privacy settings to exclude them from OS X's index, which means they're unavailable in Spotlight and any other app that also relies on the search system (HoudahSpot etc.). Alfred should have the ability to exclude specific folders and filetypes from global and file-filter results, much like the file-filter include functionality, but in reverse.Īlfred uses Apple's search API, which is include-only.
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