Spotlight search & the system preferences

[koorb]

Ok Tiger is great (gr-r-reat — sorry!). I like the new spotlight search, works well.

The problem I have just run in to though, is in the system preferences. I could initially open the sys prefs and type something into the spotlight box there, all items go dim and a light becomes brighter over the preferences most appropriate for my search term (coupled with a dropped down list of possible preference terms). This will be good for those occasions I just sit and stare at the options without being able to see the one I want for hours!

Now though, all items just go dim, none ever light up. No matter what I type there is no drop down of matched terms and no items alight! If I create a new user and sign-in with it, everything works fine. Presumably then, it is something in my user folder that is confusing the situation.

Any tips or comments would be brilliant? I have tried checking and fixing disk permissions with no effect.



— Just as a side note, I am a fairly new mac user (mac mini is my first but I am also a software developer, used to unix systems. Why is it, do you think, that Apple have decided to offer no way (that I can see, and I mean without third parties) to show hidden files (and thus not search for them) from the GUI? I am fairly happy to use the terminal and the beautiful locate function but I think it's a shame I can not see them in the GUI. (please don't tell me about third party solutions, though


Thanks folks

 

[elander]

Open Terminal and type:

defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE

Restart the Finder, and see all sorts of crud littering your hard drive...

As for the real problem you have, I'd try to reindex the startup volume if I were you. That might be overkill, but do it when you know you won't be using the computer for a few hours, i.e. when you're going to sleep. That way you won't really loose any usetime.

You can reindex the startup volume by issuing this command in Terminal:

sudo mdutil -E /

 

[fryke]

Or just find and throw away System Preferences' preference file. Might help, too...

 

[koorb]

Thanks guys

defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE

Thats really useful to know thanks.

I will try what you suggest, just out of interest, is it harmful to delete any .plist item out of the user library (or any where)? will it just get recreated?

 

[elander]

I will try what you suggest, just out of interest, is it harmful to delete any .plist item out of the user library (or any where)? will it just get recreated?

That really depends on the application that uses the .plist. Generally it should only mean that the application goes back to its "factory default" settings. Beware though, I've seen some apps sticking their user license code in the .plist too...

Try moving it first, instead of removing. If it gets recreated and nothing bad happens, delete the one you moved. Don't do it right away though, it might take a while before you find out if something nasty happened...

 

[koorb]

You may be interested to know, this problem came back, but this time was not solved with the methods above. After a little poking around I discovered that it was due to a 3rd party preference panel. In this case specifically SCPlugin (for svn repository integration to finder) I have another two — widget manager and growl — but spotlight seems to play ok with those.

 

[Decado]

It usually is third-party stuff when things go wrong. Good that you found out what it was!