Spotlight Optimization for macOS

Spotlight Optimization for macOS | Generated by AI

Home 2026.05

Done. Here’s what happened and what to expect:

What was done

Action	Effect
`touch ~/Projects/.metadata_never_index`	Spotlight will never crawl `~/Projects/` — that’s your `node_modules`, dev repos, etc.
`touch ~/Library/Caches/.metadata_never_index`	Won’t index cache files
`touch ~/Downloads/.metadata_never_index`	Won’t index Downloads
`touch ~/Library/Application\ Support/.metadata_never_index`	Won’t index app data
`sudo mdutil -E /`	Erased the existing index — forces clean rebuild
`pkill -9 mdworker mds`	Killed the CPU storm immediately

What you’ll see

The ~250% CPU spike from mdworker will be gone in ~30 seconds
Spotlight will rebuild its index but only for system files, Applications, your Documents, Desktop, etc. — skipping the 50GB+ of garbage it was crawling before
The rebuild will finish in 1-2 minutes instead of 15+
After today, every reboot will have a near-instant Spotlight rebuild instead of a 15-minute CPU hammering

What still works

Cmd+Space search still works
You can still search Applications, System Settings, Documents, etc.
Anything inside ~/Projects/, ~/Downloads/, ~/Library/Caches/, ~/Library/Application Support/ just won’t show up in search results — which is probably what you want

To undo (if you ever want search back in those folders):

rm ~/Projects/.metadata_never_index ~/Library/Caches/.metadata_never_index ~/Downloads/.metadata_never_index ~/Library/Application\ Support/.metadata_never_index
sudo mdutil -E /

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