Indexing
What is indexed
Section titled “What is indexed”Floodlight indexes your home directory. Choose another folder with ⌘ L; the selection persists across launches. Floodlight can search only the locations macOS allows it to read.
Applications in standard macOS locations and inside the selected folder appear as launchable results. System Settings panes are searchable by name and common keywords.
Live updates
Section titled “Live updates”New, renamed, moved, and deleted items appear without restarting Floodlight. Newly installed applications and System Settings changes also refresh in the background. Use ⇧ ⌘ R when you want to rebuild the file index immediately.
Content search
Section titled “Content search”Floodlight can search supported text content when filename matches are sparse. Images and PDFs are searchable by filename, not by their contents.
Intentional exclusions
Section titled “Intentional exclusions”Floodlight skips hidden paths and noisy dependency or build directories such as
node_modules, Python virtual environments and caches, and Rust build output.
It also skips Library/Caches, Library/Application Support,
Library/Containers, and Library/Group Containers. Git ignore rules are
honored when the selected folder is a repository.
An empty folder does not appear until it contains an indexable file. Permission-denied paths, ignored paths, and anything outside the selected scope are not indexed. Full Disk Access can broaden readable coverage but does not override intentional exclusions.
Rebuild the index
Section titled “Rebuild the index”Press ⇧ ⌘ R to rebuild the file index. Rebuilding never deletes or modifies your files.