Spotlight problems

Spotlight and the Library folder

Updated 2026-07-31 · 5 min read

Your Library folder holds mail, messages, app data and preferences — gigabytes of real files you own. Spotlight will not return most of it, and Finder will not even show you the folder.

What is actually in there

~/Library is per-user application data. The parts people most often go looking for:

Folder	What it holds
~/Library/Mail	Every message and attachment Mail has downloaded
~/Library/Messages	iMessage history, including chat.db
~/Library/Application Support	Per-app data — notes, databases, project files
~/Library/Containers	Sandboxed apps' private folders
~/Library/Preferences	.plist settings files
~/Library/Caches	Disposable, and frequently enormous

Why Apple hides it

Because editing the wrong file here breaks apps, and because most people never need to. It was visible until OS X Lion, then hidden. The reasoning is sound; the side effect is that a file you know exists becomes unfindable.

Opening it

Finder → Go menu → hold Option. "Library" appears while Option is held. Or press ⇧⌘G in Finder and type ~/Library.

To unhide it permanently:

chflags nohidden ~/Library

Searching it

Finder's search will look inside once you are in the folder, but Spotlight's menu bar search still will not return results from it. From the Terminal, mdfind can be pointed at the directory:

mdfind -onlyin ~/Library "invoice"

That works when the file was indexed at all. For filename searches that must not miss anything, plain find is exhaustive and slow but honest:

find ~/Library -iname "*invoice*"

On a large Library that takes a while, because it reads every directory rather than consulting an index.

The alternative

A search index that includes ~/Library by default has no such gap — the file is either on the disk or it is not, and searching for part of its name finds it either way. That is the design decision behind Everywhere: index everything, then demote the noisy parts so Caches never crowds out what you meant, rather than excluding them and pretending they do not exist.

Common questions

Is it safe to unhide ~/Library?

Yes. chflags nohidden ~/Library only changes a display flag. Deleting things inside it is what carries risk.

Why can I find some Library files but not others?

Spotlight indexes a subset and suppresses most of it from results. What leaks through is inconsistent, which is why it feels random.