Spotlight puts your Mac's power and flexibility on center stage.
Back when I started working here in 2006, mentioning the word “Spotlight” in our offices would trigger a chorus of scoffs and guffaws. Editors who shall remain nameless complained its constant indexing was slowing down their machines and that the search functions themselves were too sluggish. Well, I’m just a friendly nerd who wanted to fit in, so I jumped on the “Spotlight, Boo!” bandwagon.
Since then, I’ve jumped back off, my feet planted firmly in “Hooray for Spotlight!” town. It helped that Apple keeps improving its performance with every iteration of Mac OS X, and it helped even more to discover that finding files is just one of Spotlight’s areas of expertise. Try some of these tricks, and Spotlight will become an essential tool for you too.
Difficulty Level: Easy
What You Need:
>> A Mac running Mac OS 10.4 or later
I launch Firefox this way so often that it's the Top Hit as soon as I press the F key.
Keyboard-command junkies don’t need to rely on an app-launching utility like Quicksilver or LaunchBar. Just press Command-Space to call up the Spotlight window and start typing the name of your application. When it appears in the Top Hit spot, press Return to launch it. If you need to navigate to it in the list of results, you can use the arrow keys (hold Command while pressing the arrow keys to jump to another section), and when it’s highlighted, press Return to launch it.
Oh, so that's what "fire" means.
You’ll notice if you open a Spotlight window (Command-Space) and type “fire” that, besides Firefox, one of the results is a Dictionary.app definition of that word. Selecting it and pressing Return opens its Dictionary entry. This can be a quicker way to look things up than to launch Dictionary from the Applications folder and type in your word. Plus, if you mouse over the definition in Spotlight’s results, a tooltip appears with the full definition for you to read without launching the Dictionary app at all.
Why, there I am!
Instead of launching Address Book or Entourage when you need somebody’s phone number or email address, just have Spotlight find the exact contact you’re looking for. Type a name into your Spotlight window (Command-Space) and use the arrow keys to select that person from the Contacts section of the results list. Pressing Return launches your contact application with that person front and center, or you can mouse over the name in the results list for a tooltip displaying their phone numbers.
If you can't remember which System Preferences deal with Bluetooth, Spotlight can.
Sometimes, even when you know what preference you want to change, it’s tricky to recall which System Preferences pane contains it. We used to launch System Preferences and use the search box in the top right, which highlights any panes that contain the word you type in.
Well, Spotlight can do that too. For instance, when we type “Bluetooth” into a Spotlight window (Command-Space), the System Preferences section of the results list contains not only the Bluetooth pane, but also Sharing and Network, two other System Preferences panes that deal with Bluetooth issues. As always, select one and press Return to launch it.
Figure out how much a $159/night hotel room costs after 17% worth of taxes are applied.
Spotlight can perform calculations for you too, saving you the trouble of launching Calculator. Just call up that trusty Spotlight window (Command-Space) and start typing your equation. Remember that the multiplication symbol is * rather than x.
The result will be displayed right in the Spotlight window, and if you press Return, the Calculator app launches with your result displayed. That can be handy, since once you click elsewhere on your Mac’s screen (say, to type the result into a document), the Spotlight window closes and your equation isn’t visible until you open it again with Command-Space.
When we Command-clicked the highlighted result, the Finder window launched.
To find out which folder holds a particular file, search for that file with Spotlight, but don’t just highlight the file in the results list and press Return--that launches the file in question. Instead, hold Command and press Return (or, if you’re a mouse user, hold Command and click), and a Finder window will launch that shows your particular file inside the folder where it resides.
Follow this article's author, Susie Ochs, on Twitter.
laptopleon
August 10, 2010 at 11:50am
The indexing that is needed for spotlight, can still cause hours or even days of hard disk churning, specially after, for example, updating your system.
