EYEHEARTZOMBIES

So I’ve been trying out the amazing TextMate application for my Rails development needs. It’s a great little text editor that has a nice feature of saving a project. You open up/create all the files that relate to a particular piece of work, be it XHTML and CSS files or Ruby documents or even whole folders. Folders auto-update, too. Add something new to a folder and it’s new contents are added into the project listing. You save projects so you can pull them back up with a double-click on the file. Saves a lot of time.

Well, being that I’m using OS X Tiger, and I have this supposedly-nifty new feature of Smart Folders, I thought to myself “I’m going to make this easy and have a Smart Folder of all of my TextMate projects.”

Now, for those of you not familiar with Smart Folders, they’re basically a saved Spotlight search. Spotlight is, of course, the much-lauded new search feature in OS X Tiger that searches through little tags attached to all of your files (as well as their contents, filename, created date, modified date, etc…) giving you really fast access to them. Just hit the hotkeys/click the icon, type in what you want, and away you go.

Yesterday I decided to give it a go and hit my Finder’s File menu and chose “New Smart Folder”. It brought up a window and I typed “TextMate project” into the text box I was given after choosing “Other” for the Kind. The little circle spun, the beachball spun. Nothing came into the window. It actually crashed Finder after about 10 minutes. “Wow,” I thought. So I decided to give good ol’ Spotlight a chance on it’s own.

Clicked the icon, typed in “TextMate project.” A few minutes go by, nothing. Typed in the name of the project, “Gaming.” Another few minutes, nothing. The word in my head was anything but “wow” at this point.

So, I decide to give my best friend a try. I hit the Quicksilver hotkey and when it’s comforting bezel popped up, I typed in the name of the file. Something like 0.666543 seconds later it was showing me my file. A single return launched TextMate and pulled up the file I wanted.

Now, granted, I did go back and search on Quicksilver for “TextMate project” and nothing came up. But Quicksilver isn’t made for searching fileTYPES like Spotlight supposedly is.

I got on my computer around 7:30 a.m. this morning. At probably 7:35 a.m. I decided to try the Smart Folder of TextMate projects again. It’s now 8:15 a.m. and it’s yet to return a single result.

Spotlight just became about as useful as the dock.