So this is a weird one. I upgraded my M1 MBP 2021 to Sequoia 15.2. All seemed well. Got a deal for the Bartender app, decided to try it. Installed, all seemed well. Then Spotlight got weird. I use Cmd-space all the time to launch apps. No apps appeared. Did some research, tried to erase and reindex using command line utility mdutil. DIdn’t help. Contacted Apple support. Tried a few things to reindex, eventually got it working. A week later, symptoms recurred, no changes to system. Called Apple. The tech quickly zeroed in on Bartender, suggested I completely uninstall and delete. Did so. Could immediately start launching apps again, though reindexing was and still is occurring in the background, has been for several hours. Talked to another higher level tech at Apple. He suggested waiting for indexing to complete, then try reinstalling Bartender, and see if it makes a difference. Has anybody seen anything like this? It seems like Bartender is at fault, but this is not definitive. I could find no reference to anything like this online. Anybody?
Here Cmd-Space for Spotlight is working OK. M1 MBP 2021, Sequoia 15.2 and Bartender 5.2.7. Hope you can find the solution!
Some questions and ideas:
When you say “I use Cmd-space all the time to launch apps. No apps appeared.” do you mean a) Cmd-space does nothing (no window opens to enter your search), b) you can enter query and no apps appear in results, but other things (files, emails, etc.) do, or c) you can enter query, but there are no results?
Is quitting Bartender sufficient for Cmd-space to work again? Or do you need to uninstall?
Just possible that you have a Bartender shortcut that conflicts with Spotlight. Look in Bartender’s Settings - Hot Keys. I would also disable all Triggers.
Try resetting all Bartender settings by deleting the preference file. Quit Bartender, delete ~/Library/Preferences/com.surteesstudios.Bartender.plist and restart Bartender.
I have macOS 15.2 Bartender 5.2.7 - not seeing your problem.
Thanks for your response. Cmd-space brings up the Spotlight search dialog, but I get rubbish results. Apps should appear at the top of the list, but they don’t appear at all.
That doesn’t seem like a problem related to Bartender.
I agree 100%, that’s why this is so weird. But removing Bartender stopped the problem.
It’s worth checking System Settings > Spotlight to make sure everything is as you want it. Perhaps Bartender got in the way, somehow?
Thanks Adam - been there, done that. Wish it was something obvious!
try free app OnyX to reset many paramaters including spodtlight - or check system settings spotlight settings
I suspect the problem is unrelated to Bartender, because I’m not running that, but I’ve had significant Spotlight problems since 15.2.
It -looks like- they’re now fixing. I went into Safe Mode, and did the following:
- Removed all local time machine backups (so I had plenty of disk working space, a note I read said “Spotlight indexing will fail if there’s not enough free space.”) ( sudo tmutil deletelocalsnapshots )
- Removed all Spotlight metadata ( sudo mdutil -Eai off )
- Re-enabled Spotlight metadata ( sudo mdutil -Eai on )
- Rebooted
Now step 3 has been funky! for me. It seems it may take time for re-indexing to take effect. Wait an hour or so, run sudo mdutil -sa to see if the metadata is being regenerated. It seems others have observed Spotlight indexing issues on Sequoia, reading the various help forums. I admit to “just trying things until I found something that seemed to work.”
As a side note, trying to add any volumes/folders to the Spotlight privacy settings got “an unknown error has occurred.” That’s what drove me to more extreme measures.
Interesting. I did your steps 1, 2, 3, though not in safe mode. Didn’t help. I’m going to wait for the next OS update, and if things still seem weird, then try doing it in safe mode.