Is there any way to make Mac OS X Spotlight only index the file names and not the contents?

I do understand that the point of Spotlight is to look inside files, but it also returns file name matches, and that's what I need most of the time. Besides, Spotlight is running so absurdly slow on my system (Snow Leopard on the iMac '08), it's just unusable. I downloaded Canary and Spotlight wasn't able to find the app file for 15 minutes. It was already in the download stack, but as far as Spotlight goes, the file doesn't exist.

Hence, I would like to know of a way to make Spotlight only index the file names, which would perhaps make it a bit faster. I'm looking at mimicking the behaviour of Windows applications such as AvaFind or Search Everything

Edit: Let me highlight the fact that I am looking for an AvaFind or Search Everything replacement for Mac OS X. Go try one of these on a Windows machine and you'll understand my disappointment with Spotlight or any other popular search tools in OS X.


As far as I know, Spotlight is hardcoded to work this way. Most people in your situation simply disable spotlight, and use an alternative, like EasyFind.

If this is too drastic, you may want to clear out Spotlight's .Spotlight-V100 file at the root of your drive to force reindexing. Once reindexed, you might see better performance (and you might not).


There is also the command locate, which is already installed.

From the locate man page:

    The locate program searches a database for all pathnames which match the
     specified pattern.  The database is recomputed periodically (usually
     weekly or daily), and contains the pathnames of all files which are pub-
     licly accessible.

Actually, you just need to use an alternate interface to Spotlight. HoudahSpot allows you to search by any criteria of your liking. E.g. search by file name only.