MacOS – Finder search does not work properly for Tibetan unicode after Yosemite upgrade

indexingmacosspotlight

I have seen Finder is giving some issues. For me, it is working fine as long as I use Latin characters. Since I work with Tibetan, I was used to search for text. When updating to Yosemite, it stopped working properly. I have checked with various friends and all have the same issue: Yosemite indexing has changed from Mavericks.

So here is a description: letters of the alphabet are still indexed (like ཀ་ཁ་ག་ང་), but when they are combined (like རྒ་), Spotlight is the blue, giving no answer. Again, this used to work very well before.

I have tried reindexing, following Apple's suggestion, but no success. It seems to be related to the indexing method itself.

Any advice? This is a big issue as we are used to search with Finder — a feature that is normally powerful in OSX.

Spotlight working well with simple letters

Spotlight not working with stacked letters

Best Answer

I discovered recently exactly the same problem for certain Cyrillic characters. After trouble-shooting it became obvious that the culprit is lack of unicode support in the Apple indexing. The workaround is to use the alternative search - such as Find Any File.

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What happens if you try in terminal.app (change /Search/Directory/ to yours):

mdfind -onlyin /Search/Directory/ kMDItemFSName == "\"NUCLEUS SOUNDLAB Pantheon III.rfl\""

Or in applescript editor.

    set searchPath to "/Search/Directory/"

    set this_item to "/Users/USERNAME/Desktop/NUCLEUS SOUNDLAB Pantheon III.rfl"

    set theFileName to "\\\"" & (do shell script "basename " & quoted form of (POSIX path of (this_item))) & "\\\"" as string

--set theFileName to quoted form of (do shell script "basename " & quoted form of (POSIX path of (this_item))) as string

  set theOrigFilePath to paragraphs of (do shell script "mdfind -onlyin " & searchPath & " kMDItemFSName == \"" & theFileName & "\"")

MacOS – Finder search doesn’t work properly after Yosemite update

Has your spotlight been botched? IN short, finder relies on spotlight to find things quickly.

This will take a while (5 or so mins) and make your Mac go into "jump-jet" mode with the fans, but:

Drop to terminal
type in sudo rm -rf /.Spotlight-V100
then sudo rm -rf /.Spotlight-V200
then sudo mdutil -i off /
then sudo mdutil -i on /
finally sudo mdutil -E /

Basically in sport, it resets spotlight and tells it to reindex EVERYTHING it normally should do on your "Macintosh HD". (Everything unless you've previously added entries to the privacy list)

As I said before, it'll make your fans go crazy for a while, but this is expected.

After that, all should be great! :)

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MacOS – Finder search doesn’t work properly after Yosemite update

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