APP Request: Spotlight Indexing

You could use cron jobs. Thats the best imo. It’s easy to setup and u can prob get a GUI app for editing / making cron jobs

No app I know of, but the built-in `mdutil` gets you most of it. `sudo mdutil -a -i off` pauses indexing, `-i on` resumes, `mdutil -s /` shows status. To see what it's working on, watch `mds_stores` and `mdworker_shared` in Activity Monitor. There's no native scheduling, but a small launchd job flipping it off at night does the trick. And if it's constantly re-indexing, add the churny folders (node_modules, build dirs) to System Settings > Spotlight > Search Privacy, that usually fixes the cause.

i would avoid leaving indexing off long-term. Safer path: check whether mds_stores or mdworker is actually busy while the slowdown happens, then exclude folders that churn a lot like build outputs, VM images, downloads, or big sync folders. If it only hurts during work hours, pause it temporarily and turn it back on later so Finder/Mail/search do not slowly get weird.

For most of this, the built-in tools are probably the real interface. `mdutil -s /` for status, `sudo mdutil -a -i off` / `on` for disabling and re-enabling indexing, and Activity Monitor for `mds_stores` / `mdworker_shared`. But if Spotlight is slowing the machine down often, I’d look for the cause before scheduling around it. Common culprit is churny folders: `node_modules`, build outputs, generated media, VM folders, large synced folders. Adding those to Spotlight Privacy usually helps more than trying to micromanage indexing itself. A GUI for this would be useful, but it would mostly be wrapping `mdutil`, privacy exclusions, and maybe launchd scheduling.

Unfortunately I don't think Apple provides exposed controls for this, and if there's private frameworks that potentially allow this, they could be nuked/changed at any time. Curious on why you'd want verbose control over it? A lot of things on macOS rely on Spotlight, which is why it's not recommended to disable and just let it do it's thing.

That's fair, u/actvt_io posted the CLI commands you can use to check this. But as for something native and app focused, if one was to create this, it wouldn't be using frameworks/api calls and likely delegate to said commands.