Disable Spotlight and life without it

I've recently noticed that the mds_stores process on my Mac is consuming a significant amount of CPU power. Again.

mds_stores is a background process that indexes files for faster searching in Spotlight. Seasoned macOS users very likely know about it and know that wise decision would be to disable some of search areas by changing Spotlight settings. This is me too. I have only Applications, Calculator and System Settings items enabled and still mds_stores is the first in the list of cpu consumers in Activity Monitor. I'm not sure if it happened after updating macOS or earlier for some other reason.

Something needs to be done. This is last straw :)

I'm disabling Spotlight completely:

sudo mdutil -ai off

It spat out the following:

/:
2024-11-22 00:21:40.119 mdutil[25437:982881] mdutil disabling Spotlight: / -> kMDConfigSearchLevelFSSearchOnly
        Indexing disabled.
/System/Volumes/Data:
2024-11-22 00:21:40.144 mdutil[25437:982881] mdutil disabling Spotlight: /System/Volumes/Data -> kMDConfigSearchLevelFSSearchOnly
Error: unable to perform operation.  (-1)
        Error: unknown indexing state.
/System/Volumes/Preboot:
Error: invalid operation.
        Error: unknown indexing state.

Maybe these errors are somehow related to the problem. After running the command second time it reported that indexing is disabled without any errors.

It's sad to loose Spotlight functionality. Brief research revealed existence of similar apps such as Alfred or Raycast. I haven't tried them because I probably can't use most of their features. Eventually I figured that I can write simple alternatives for my needs myself. That I did.

The main feature of Spotlight that I miss the most is fast opening any app by typing in Spotlight search field. The solution would be to search the *.app in special directories. Filter/search could be done using fzf (or similar tools). And opening an app will be done using native Apple script. Here is the first working script in bash:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

function list_apps {
    find "$1" -type d -maxdepth 1 -name '*.app' | sed 's#.*/##' | sed 's/.app$//'
}

paste -d'\n' <(list_apps /Applications) <(list_apps /System/Applications) <(list_apps /System/Applications/Utilities) | \
    xargs -I{} echo "{}" | \
    sort -if | \
    fzf --header "Select app to open" | \
    xargs -I{} osascript -e "tell application \"{}\" to activate"

Here is how it looks:

I'll probably update this script in the future if I find any bugs or find myself missing some features. You can always check my dotfiles for that here.

For now I'm happy with this simple solution, knowing that mds_stores won't use any cpu to no purpose.