I select a director and search. When specifying "This Mac" ... all results are there. When specifying the directory I am searching from ... nothing. I have already re-indexed spotlight by selecting folders to exclude from search and adding them back. I even restarted with them selected and then removed them from the spotlight exclusion. I deleted the apple.com.finder plist. Still nothing. Its an important capability
MacBook Air (M2, 2022)
Gordon Echlin wrote:
I select a director and search. When specifying "This Mac" ... all results are there. When specifying the directory I am searching from ... nothing. I have already re-indexed spotlight by selecting folders to exclude from search and adding them back. I even restarted with them selected and then removed them from the spotlight exclusion. I deleted the apple.com.finder plist. Still nothing. Its an important capability
https://discussions.apple.com/content/attachment/5e5c245c-b352-4e75-8742-8199be29b6c2
On the two Macs I have on Ventura, the search does find those files as long as I specify "name contains" the string, in your case the string was "screen." The picture you posted of your search not finding anything was to search for the string "screen" inside the file, not as the being contained in the filename. What happens when you search for all files in that directory that have a filename containing the specified string? On my Macs it does find all those files, I use that tool all the time to find files whose filename contain a certain string, within a specified directory.
Gordon Echlin wrote:
I select a director and search. When specifying "This Mac" ... all results are there. When specifying the directory I am searching from ... nothing. I have already re-indexed spotlight by selecting folders to exclude from search and adding them back. I even restarted with them selected and then removed them from the spotlight exclusion. I deleted the apple.com.finder plist. Still nothing. Its an important capability
https://discussions.apple.com/content/attachment/5e5c245c-b352-4e75-8742-8199be29b6c2
On the two Macs I have on Ventura, the search does find those files as long as I specify "name contains" the string, in your case the string was "screen." The picture you posted of your search not finding anything was to search for the string "screen" inside the file, not as the being contained in the filename. What happens when you search for all files in that directory that have a filename containing the specified string? On my Macs it does find all those files, I use that tool all the time to find files whose filename contain a certain string, within a specified directory.
I can duplicate your problem. It's a bug/deficiency in Spotlight so should be reported to Apple via Feedback - macOS - Apple.
If you're looking for an excellent search tool (file names only) give the shareware app Find Any File a try. It's extremely effective.
FAF can search areas that Spotlight can't like invisible folders, system folders and packages.
Thanks for the input Steve. It doesn't matter if I'm searching for content in files or if I'm looking for filenames, both fail. I too have multiple Macs running Ventura, including a M1 Mac mini I cloned for my M2 MacBook Air ... and an M1 iMac ... both machines function properly and efficiently, finding both content and filenames within a specific directory, on Ventura.
sorry ... I deleted the com.apple.finder.plist.
another symptom .. given time, results DO start to appear in the directory focused search. A long time.
Thanks for the response
search selected directory not working in finder
