Big Sur : The end of Flashlight

[w0lfschild]

There will be no support moving forward for future macOS releases.

Significant changes have been made to Spotlight in Big Sur add that on top of the fact Flashlight was already partly broken in recent releases, around 10.15.4 and beyond, I've decided to discontinue my efforts in this project. There are also not many users 387 on v1.2 according to analytics.

It will remain open source and anyone can make a pull request if they're able to get some semblance of Flashlight working on macOS 11.0 but at this point Flashlight is dead.

💀

[noethig]

Hey @w0lfschild,
do you know about an alternative plugin for spotlight as of Big Sur? Or are you yourself not using this feature on your mac in another way?

[w0lfschild]

@noethig

The alternative is to use an an app like Alfred. There are 5+ types of apps that replicate spotlight to some degree or another.

I can almost say with 100% certainty that no one will make an alternative to Flashlight. macOS modding via code injection is pretty much dead and what semblance of it is left alive Apple is slowly killing with each release.

I can also say with near 100% certainty that nobody will make a PR to fix this on Big Sur or the later releases of Catalina for that matter.

On top of the above, as far as I can tell M1 machines would basically require a "jailbreak" to even get code injection working on first party apps or apps built as arm64e.