Spotlight vs Alfred - "Developer"/.plist files

[binarysmurf]

Guys and Gals,

 

I had an interesting issue last night where there was an erroneous entry in my Default Browser drop-down in Safari Preferences, as illustrated below:

 

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/92027174/Screen%20Shot%202013-07-30%20at%209.05.26%20PM.jpg

 

The Wondershare App that is displayed was not even on my system any more, and DEFINITELY was not a browser. I figured that there would be a phantom plist somewhere.

 

I typed 'Wondershare' into Alfred, and there WERE a few bits and pieces listed which I removed, but this did not fix the issue.

 

I typed Wondershare into Spotlight, and Wondershare.plist appeared in the Developers section. I deleted it, and rebooted my Mac. The Wondershare entry illustrated above disappeared! I was very happy.

 

My questions:

 

1) Why didn't Alfred find 'Wondershare.plist', but Spotlight did?

 

and 

 

2) What do I need to change in Alfred setting to make sure that plist files are displayed in future?

 

 

Cheers,

Smurf

[Wildcard]

Hello,

 

Check out my response to a similar issue here:

 

http://www.alfredforum.com/topic/2886-search-system-files/#entry16886

 

To supplement that, I want to comment that one of the things that makes Alfred so snappy is that it DOESN'T search the entire system.  And it doesn't search for all types of files.  In order to do that, I heavily recommend using a workflow (with a keyword, perhaps "sp" for "spotlight") rather than expanding the default scope to include everything, which will greatly slow Alfred down on routine tasks.

 

In actual fact, I have a little workflow set up which does this trick, and a few others, but I don't have any easy way to share it here because there's no way to upload attachments....

[binarysmurf]

Thank you so much. I've added the 'sp' keyword as suggested.