Hi everyone,
I've been a regular user of Alfred for some time now and find it fairly indispensable for speedily getting around my computer. Primarily I use it to locate documents quickly and am not really interested in some of its other functions.
I have for a while been experiencing some problems in that Alfred is just not finding certain documents. This is obviously then really frustrating because I have to go through Finder to locate it.
As an example, I have a document entitled 'Winter/Spring 2019 Productivity Planner' but when I type 'open productivity' into Alfred, that particular document is not coming up at all. It doesn't come up with the 'Find' function either. The same document also does not come up in Spotlight.
It seems to be fairly random and arbitrary which documents come up and which don't. And it seems to re-configure itself after a while so that a document that I use regularly which doesn't come up, later I find it there when I go to use it again. I did think that there might have been a pattern in that recently opened documents don't show up but I'm not sure.
Here's what I've done to try and solve the issue:
Downloaded Alfred 3 (I was previously using an older version)
Basic computer reboot
Reload Alfred cache
Limited my search scope to just the folders that I would like to search in. Prior to changing this I had the default settings and I had the 'Include folders in Home' button ticked.
I have made sure that my Spotlight search results are checked.
I have also tried to reindex my Mac. I did have some confusion with this and the internet seems to suggest that this is the most likely solution to the problem so let me walk you through what I did and you guys can let me know if I did it wrong.
I went to the 'Advanced' tab on Alfred's preferences and clicked 'Rebuild MacOS Metadata'
I have done this with and without clicking the 'Delete /.Spotlight-V100' button.
I press enter to continue as per the instructions on Terminal and I enter my password successfully.
If I have clicked the 'Delete /.Spotlight-V100' button, at this point it tells me that the 'Operation is not permitted' but either way it always says 'Indexing enabled'.
It then gives the instruction 'Press any key to close Terminal and continue' . All of the keys that I press just type into Terminal with no discernible effect and if I wait, nothing seems to happen. If I press enter then it seems to finish and it says 'Process completed'.
Then I'm done. It makes no difference at all. Some places on the web seem to say that rebuilding the metadata can take hours but that's all I can seem to do. Not sure if I'm doing it wrong or missing a step or I should not press enter at step 5 and just wait it out.
Any other suggestions. Thanks for your help!