Text-Based Application Launchers

The dock in OS X works great for application launching, but there are times when you wish to quickly start an application that is not in the Dock.  A text-based launcher will allow a user to type in the first few letters of the application name and a selectable list will appear displaying matching applications.  Pick the one you need, and the application will start.

 

With OS X Tiger, I had used Quicksilver as an application launcher, due to the sluggishness of Tiger Spotlight.  A Leopard version of Quicksilver was released, but, unfortunately, Quicksilver is now no longer under support. With the new Spotlight peppiness in Leopard, I have begun comparing Spotlight against Quicksilver and have turned-off Quicksilver to see how well I adjust to life without it. QuickSilver is just plain fast, but the Leopard version of Spotlight is quite better than the Tiger version. I have not noticed a big difference in performance between Spotlight and Quicksilver as long as I set applications to the highest priority in Spotlight preferences.

Making Spotlight searches faster

Just after upgrading to Leopard, Spotlight was super-fast. After a few months, the speed has drastically gone downhill. Perhaps some of the Leopard fixes impacted Spotlight's speed? I then tweaked the Spotlight preferences a bit. If "Webpages" is unselected in the Spotlight preferences, my total search time is cut in about half. So...it must be my web cache. I tried keeping the setting turned off and separating web searches to Google Desktop, but it does not have the same effect. Safari history cover flow is great, even if it is in Finder.

So my second choice is to keep the setting selected, but move "Webpages" to the bottom of the Spotlight preferences list. This appears to help. As long as I am not searching for a webpage, results return quickly.

Another tweak involves removing unnecessary Spotlight indexing.  For example, an external hard drive used for Time Machine backups would probably not need indexing.  You may also monitor the size of the Spotlight index file to see the net effect of indexing exclusions.