Speed up your old Macbook by disabling Spotlight for your development folders

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I was reading about how the new Macbook Pro’s were having battery problems the first few days of usage. Most people looked at the index process of Spotlight as the source of the problem. Especially if you use a package manager like npm oder composer which creates a massive amount of folders and files.

Then it hit me. If I were to disable the indexing for my development folders Spotlight wouldn’t have to index them at all and this should free up some computing resources. But I could still use spotlight to search my actual documents and use it to launch apps.

Disabling Spotlight for certain folders

First open up your system preferences and click on the Spotlight entry in the first row.

Next click on the tab labeled privacy.

I’ve already added my Clion, PhpStorm and other project folders to the list so they won’t be indexed by spotlight.

Click the button labeled “+” to add your own folders which shouldn’t be indexed.

You can also just drag folders onto the window to exclude them from being indexed.

That’s it, you’re done.

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