Blog
Notes from the launcher
Product updates, deep dives into keyboard-first workflows, and the occasional rant about Spotlight. Written by the CmdSpace team.
Why Raycast users are switching launchers in 2026
Raycast was, for the better part of three years, the default answer to "what macOS launcher should I install." Active development, beautiful UI, healthy extensions ecosystem, generous free tier. It still is a good product. Yet through 2025…
When a launcher syncs to a remote server, here's the real price
Several modern macOS launchers advertise "sync across your devices" as a headline feature. It sounds free — your snippets just show up on your other Mac, like magic. The actual mechanics are not free, and the bill is not paid in money. Thi…
macOS Tahoe 26 Spotlight vs CmdSpace: what the new command palette gets right and wrong
For the first time in roughly a decade, Spotlight feels like Apple actually opened it up and rewrote it. macOS Tahoe 26 ships a real command-palette UI — tabs for Apps, Files, Actions, and Clipboard reachable via Cmd+1, Cmd+2, Cmd+3, Cmd+4…
Spotlight vs Finder search on macOS: when to use which (and when neither works)
Most macOS users think of Spotlight and Finder search as the same thing wearing two different hats. They are not. They share a backend — both lean on the mds daemon and the on-disk metadata index — but the way each surfaces results is genu…
Spotlight Search privacy in 2026: what Apple sends, and what stays local
Spotlight is one of the most-used features on macOS and one of the least-examined. Most users type ⌘Space dozens of times a day and never read a privacy disclosure. The mechanics are not secret — Apple has documentation for most of it — bu…
Spotlight on macOS Tahoe can't find your files? Six fixes that actually work
You type a filename you know is on disk. Spotlight returns nothing — or worse, it returns the file's parent folder but not the file itself. On macOS Tahoe 26 this has become common enough that the TidBits forum keeps a running thread about…
mdworker eating your CPU on macOS? Here's what to do in 2026
If your fans suddenly sound like a jet engine and Activity Monitor shows a process named mdworkershared or mdsstores near the top, you have already met Spotlight's indexer. On a healthy machine the indexer should be invisible — it runs in…
Why Spotlight keeps reindexing after every macOS update (and how to stop it)
You install a .x.0 release on Sunday night. Monday morning your Mac is warm, the fan is on, and Activity Monitor shows mdsstores near the top of the CPU list. Tuesday it is still there. The internet says "this is normal after an update", a…
Is Spotlight wearing down your SSD? Evidence from Sequoia and Tahoe
If you owned a Mac on macOS Sequoia in 2024 and watched the "Bytes Written" line in Disk Utility climb hundreds of gigabytes a day with the lid closed, you were not imagining it. Spotlight's indexer briefly turned into one of the largest s…
Turn off Siri Suggestions on macOS: a step-by-step privacy reset
Siri Suggestions is the umbrella name for the predictions macOS surfaces in Spotlight, Safari, Mail, Messages, the Share sheet, and a handful of other places — the "you might want to text this person", "you might want to open this app", "h…
Why Spotlight is hostile to developers (and what to replace it with)
Spotlight was designed to find your photos, your Mail messages, and the occasional Numbers spreadsheet. It was not designed to coexist with a developer's home directory. After ten years of yearly macOS updates, that design mismatch has har…
Rebuild the Spotlight index in 2026: the only guide you need
A Spotlight rebuild is the macOS equivalent of "have you tried turning it off and on again?" — boring, slightly slow, and effective often enough to be the first real fix to try when search results stop matching reality. This guide is the l…