March 15, 2026
Spotlight can no longer find the stock Apple apps on my iMac
I’ve had my iMac for almost a decade now, and aside from slowing down a bit over the years, it’s worked just fine.
Until now.
It started with Spotlight no longer being able to find any apps or files. After a lot of back and for with Claude that resulted in more time in Terminal than I normally like, along with a trying number of reboots, I was able to force Spotlight to re-index.
Spotlight is now back to normal except for one weird thing — it can’t find the stock Apple apps, including, just to make things more irritating, Terminal. These apps are kept in a separate part of the system, and Spotlight — for reasons unknown — is no longer able to index this part.
Claude suggests re-installing macOS, insisting that it’s not that hard and only takes 30 minutes. I’m skeptical, and besides there are other solutions. For one thing, Terminal is now in the dock.
And Spotlight has been demoted from Command-Space. I’ve turned that combo over to Launchbar, which has no trouble finding stock apps. I’m tempted to go on a rant about why on earth a third-party app would be better at indexing than the one built in. But I'll spare you.
I tried other launchers. Raycast found the stock apps, but slowed down the computer to the point of making it juddery. Alfred, surprisingly, could not find the stock apps. Quicksilver found them, but has an interface that only a mother could love.
Launchbar is free if you don’t mind the occasional nag. I haven’t been nagged yet, so we’ll see how that goes. If it gets bad, I might be tempted to see if I can bear Quicksilver. Or, you know, actually pay for Launchbar.
Update: Now Mail won't send email. I switched to Spark, which has a free version that seems fine. But this really is annoying. My expectation is that it would be the opposite — Apple's apps should be the gold standard for basic reliability. Third-party apps should only be there for optional functionality.