Spotlight needs help

I love Leopard now. I never minded the transparent menu bar, and there are so many easy ways to make the dock more attractive and useful that it is no longer an issue. But... I do have a big problem with the new changes in spotlight.

In tiger, you could use command-space to bring up spotlight and search quickly for any file, folder, application, that you wanted. You can still do that in Leopard. In Tiger, you could option-command-space to do the same search, only it would show all entries in a new window which was consistent, not requiring the mouse over it to remain in place. From here you could select one or multiple files to show in finder and open their containing folders. I used this feature extensively to remove programs, as most programs create 2 or three additional files on the system. Also, when you set preferences for spotlight, such as not showing webpages or music files, it would honor that. No longer is this the case in Leopard.

In Leopard, you can set your spotlight preferences, and your searches will ignore those items you unchecked, until you opt to show all. Then, without any regard to your preferences, a list of everything on your computer shows up in finder. I don't like this finder integration. If it were at least similar to the old spotlight window, where items were at least categorized and it was easy to ignore those you don't care about, then that would be okay. But instead, the new setup uses finder, and includes all files that match your search criteria.

However, after using it a bit more, I can see the power that hides beneath. First, I can limit my search very easily to just my home folder instead of to the entire computer. This cuts out a lot of crap. Second, I can sort by type and scroll past that which I don't need. The downside is I have the developer tools installed and most searches bring up hundreds of C libraries. That is quite annoying. I still miss the old spotlight window where I can expand or contract the list of files of a particular type. Plus, I could choose to see a subset or all. It was really quite nice and I liked it. The gain in the new setup is being able to instantly delete the files. But I was okay with finding the files first, selecting those I wanted to delete, then opening their containing folders and doing the delete. That worked for me. This new method integrates spotlight and finder a little too much and I'm not sure I like what has been improved enough to warrant the change.

Apple Feedback