NEW SEARCH How to Make Sticky or Change Default

Francine is right on with this one but let's take it one step further. Do everything Francine says. Once you're done "saving" close the "Find" window.

Bring up "Find" again and in the "Search for" field type your new search item and your preferences for viewing the "Find" window. Click "Save" and give it a different name than your previous "search" save..whew! Repeat this for as many items that you need to search for or for however long you can stand doing it.

I can't imagine doing this for more than a half dozen search items.

Now bring up "Find" again and in your left column will be all those search items that you have just created. Just click on them and there you go!

A smart folder will retain the "view state" (icon, list, or categorized) that you last left it in. In other words, if you want a smart folder to always remain in list view, change it to list view and leave it that way. If you you want to view the smart folder's contents in, say, the categorized view for a moment, remember to change it back to list view before you close the folder. The view state that you set when you close the smart folder will be the one you'll see when you open it again.

That's what I had been doing, have a variety of List view Smart Folders which I bring up and just change, for instance, the Name: Contains field. This works well enough. But in an exchange with Tobias, he and I came up with a new hack for the default_smart.plist that sets List view as the default for a new command-f search. See HERE for details.
Francine

That's way too cool for mere mortals! Kudos to Francine and Tobias.

This thread is way too technical for the average Mac user. Apple needs to fix what they have broken!

Spotlight is a disaster for the type of searching that I think most users do 99.9% of the time. I can no longer find things on my hard drive without getting a spinning beach ball as soon as I start to type. Every time I perform a search I have to click a half dozen buttons to filter out all of the crap that it is finding imbedded in my files. I want a simple default setting that only looks at the file name, not all the imbedded crap!

I have followed the directions in this thread... and have changed the default search settings... but this is not an acceptable long-term solution. Nor is it something I want to have to do to everyone else's computer in my office.

Please Apple, let's get this fixed and do it soon! And while you are at it let's reactivate the phone book in Sherlock and stop trying to force dashboard down our throats by taking away other features. Konfabulator is better, faster, easier to program, and I am not switching to your poor ripped off implementation of it!

Right on Adam! It is surprising to see search functionality get worse by upgrading to the new operating system. Especially when it was one of the main things that they were touting in the MacWorld keynote. Nothing about it is faster. I have six 250 gig hard drives connected to my computer and there is a frustrating delay every time I try to do a simple search. It takes me about 30 seconds to perform a search in Tiger that took about 5 seconds in Panther.