Neovim does not appears in Spotlight search

[geraldus]

Hi!

I've built neovim-dot-app using brew, after brew link I see Neovim icon in Launchpad, but it is not indexed by Spotlight, hence it is not possible to launch Neovim from Spotlight search. Is there some easy fix?

[rogual]

Odd! Works for me. Maybe a permissions issue? Can you post the output of

ls -l /Applications/ | grep Neovim

Edit: Also your OS version

[megamaddu]

I've also always had this problem. I checked the permissions and Neovim.app was $USER admin. I changed it to match another app which works fine (using root wheel), but it still doesn't show up. If I delete the symlink and use Finder to create a shortcut, it works fine.

[megamaddu]

Here's a screenshot of Finder's "Get Info" for both icons. Even though the alias created with Finder is still an alias, it looks completely different and is much larger. There must be an OS X "shortcut" file that is different from a regular symlink.

[steven807]

I spent quite a bit of time over the last day or two trying to understand this. The most useful discussion seems to be here: https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew/issues/4635 (jump to the end). The gist seems to be that symlinks are not imported by Spotlight. (Aliases, created by the Finder, are, so that is one way of addressing the problem -- just remove the symlink, and create an alias instead.) This is a general problem with Homebrew, and they basically say that shouldn't have supported app bundles (i.e. "brew linkapps") at all. What I still don't understand is why I've never had this problem with MacVim.

[rogual]

Closing because 1) no reply from OP and 2) looks like a common issue for homebrew apps.

If this is happening for you, you can always just copy the app into /Applications rather than linking.