Hi mechno, hi all,
Thank you for the reply, mechno! If you ever find out why this is different in your Maverick, please let me know (I have two MBPs and one iMac, all Mavericks, all with the same problem).
It's a really a straight forward functionality, just wanting search (only) for filenames, not contents + having filenames displayed as search results, not contents.
Note: I know you can set the search to "Name" (filename), which should be the default, really, but there are three problem with that:
1) It is actually quite a fiddeling to do get to that option. When I open Spotlight (typically either via Cmd-Space, or clicking on the menubar logo) there is NO option to search for filenames only. The option only becomes available if you perform a search, which gives you a list of results, on top of which is the option "Show All in Finder". Once you click on that option and move to Finder, you can delete the last letter of the search term, re-type that letter (...) and THEN you are able to select "Name matches:[searchterm]" from the dropdown menu... This is so annoying if you search a lot, which I do. >> In short, it is too difficult to search for filename only.
2.) Even if you do that, not all files are actually displayed. For example, I wish to find all MP3 file with the name "Example" in the name of the file. However, the file "01 - Example Artist - Track01.mp3" (this is from an actual example, I just replaced artist and track names, as these are irrelevant) is found in the "Music results" section when searching for content in the menubar-Spotlight, but not found when limiting the search to filenames in Finder (yes, the file is indexed and indexing is completed). Oddly enough, the file "05 - Other Artist - Example Track.mp3" is found, probably because Example here is in the MP3 name tag >> In short, not all files are found.
3.) Finally, assuming the file is found, it only displays the MP3 name tag (instead of the filename). For example, the search result for "05 - Other Artist - Example Track.mp3" is only shown as "Example Track". If you wish to delete "05 - Other Artist - Example Track (conflicted copy).mp3" and keep "05 - Other Artist - Example Track.mp3" than you are out of luck because both search results are only shown as "Example Track". Not great if you have 300 conflicted copies... (which can easily happen with Dropbox). >> In short, search results are rather useless, at least for media files.
I still hope to find a way to "fix" Spotlight, or find the way to use Spotlight differently that is unknown to me. Otherwise, I would really need to move to an Spotlight alternative. This would be ridiculous, as Spotlight was always one of the strong points of Mac OS X, wasn't it?
Thanks for your thoughts and help on this!
