application search is not cross platform

[zsh-users]

application search is not cross platform

[nakamuray]

Is 5e1e363 fix this issue?

[junkblocker]

At least, I love it because I wrote it :) @sorin-ionescu 's idea of 'kMDItemKind == "Application"' would be

1. a more accurate and thorough way determining applications
2. extremely slow taking minutes at least on my host to return the results (and subsequent runs don't seem to get much faster either)
3. dependent on Spotlight indexing being enabled

Given those at least I prefer what I implemented. However, I also have 'locate' installed and running and getting candidates via "locate -i .app | grep '.app$'" for this is probably a better alternate implementation that I might end up implementing sometime.

[sorin-ionescu]

Depending on Spotlight is a better implementation. Who disables Spotlight indexing? Anybody? It's a non-issue.

[junkblocker]

Quick googling for spotlight indexing "disable" should convince you otherwise. Initial releases on Mountain Lion and IIRC evan Lion had a lot of slow, repetitive, high cpu indexing issues.

Even ignoring that slow execution of the spotlight query still would remain the bigger issue.

A solution with selective enabling/disabling of these implementation (mdfind, locate, glob) would be the way I'd go about it. That way everybody could be happy. Heck we could just create a separate source altogether.

[junkblocker]

@sorin-ionescu : You can try out the junkblocker@dfdea54 which implements your suggestion with

export ZAW_SRC_APPLICATIONS_USE_MDFIND=1

to see how well it does or does not work.

@nakamuray It would be good to to have a zstyles facility for source specific settings to avoid such environment variables. Please let me know your thoughts and/or if you want me to file an issue for that.

[sorin-ionescu]

While there have been Spotlight bugs, said bugs were fixed.

Environment variables should not be needed since zaw works in the same Zsh process, does not it?

[junkblocker]

Yes, but still mdfind query slowness point is the problem. It takes minutes for the query to come back.

And yes, you are correct about not needing to export it.

[sorin-ionescu]

time mdfind 'kMDItemKind == "Application"'

0.02s user 0.02s system 60% cpu 0.066 total

[junkblocker]

I am getting these sorts of numbers instead from two different Macbook Pros one 3 years old and another 6 months old both running Mountain Lion latest with 8G ram.

mdfind 'kMDItemKind == "Application"'
0.03s user 0.09s system 0% cpu 4:43.44 total

However now knowing how long it should take, I figured out what is happening. I have a local encrypted dmg ~/something.dmg mounted as a volume at /Volumes/something which is being indexed too (on both laptops). If I unmount the volume, the times start matching yours. Spotlight is likely not indexing the mounted volumes but doing a find in it instead or actively updating the index from it (the content in it changes a lot).

So, changing the query to search on / only works:

time mdfind -onlyin / 'kMDItemKind == "Application"'
0.01s user 0.01s system 23% cpu 0.098 total

and I am fine with not getting results from mounted volumes, local or remote. I'd still leave globbing as a fallback in case mdfind returned nothing as in the implementation I pointed you at. I'll make it default and propose this if it is ok with you.

[sorin-ionescu]

-onlyin / is good enough.

[junkblocker]

Sent pull request with slight change of using all of the available sources for completeness sake as mdfind is not listing apps inside apps. See proposed commits for comments.

[sorin-ionescu]

I don't think it should list apps inside apps. I don't see where you would ever want to run an app inside an app. Those apps are dependencies of the main app.

[junkblocker]

Hmm, I am kinda split on this. I was able to just launch a couple of useful sub apps using this, however yeah most of these internal apps do seem not to be usable directly. I'd still like to keep the feature though. Any suggestions? Maybe hide it behind an environment variable? Wishing for zstyle for sources very strongly right about now.

[junkblocker]

Ok, made locate use optional since it is taking about 5 seconds with it and also by default turned off internal apps. junkblocker@0363cd2 .

[nakamuray]

#23 was merged. Can I close this issue?

[sorin-ionescu]

Yeah, it should be closed.