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I have installed cocoa versions of both Emacs and MacVim using homebrew. After the installation, the actual applications are installed in /usr/local/opt/emacs/Emacs.app and /usr/local/opt/macvim/MacVim.app

They are then symlinked to /Applications

They now appear in my Applications folder, but if I want to start them using Spotlight, they do not turn up in the search results when I start typing (like other applications do)

Is there anything I can do to remedy this?

Pete
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1 Answers1

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There are many workarounds for this,

  • you can copy Emacs and MacVim direclty to your /Applications folder : cp -r /usr/local/opt/emacs/Emacs.app /Applications/ and cp -r /usr/local/opt/macvim/MacVim.app /Applications/.

  • You can run sudo chflags nohidden /usr, /usr folder is flagged as hidden but not /opt, this command will unhide /usr so that Spotlight could index it (Spotlight doesn't index hidden directories).

  • You can also make a shell script and appify it

    #!/bin/bash
open /usr/local/opt/emacs/Emacs.app

  • There is also an option in homebrew , I've not tested it personnaly, that fixes this issue : brew linkapps --system, you can remove --system if you want brew to link your.app to ~/Applications instead of /Applications

enzo
  • 1,038
  • I have tried brew linkapps. It creates a symlink in /Applications/ to the right thing, but Spotlight still doesn't find it. However, if I “Make Alias” in Finder and put that in /Applications/, it does find it. (Note: I'm trying with IDLE 3.app, not Emacs or MacVim.) – Jacktose Sep 12 '16 at 23:57