10 Tips For Using the New Spotlight To Search For Files

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Spotlight has changed a lot with macOS Tahoe. Here are ten tips for searching for Files with Spotlight. 

In macOS Tahoe and beyond you can use Spotlight for all sorts of things. Launching Apps, performing Actions, looking at your Clipboard History. But primarily you probably still want to use Spotlight to search for files. You can certainly do that. In fact you can click on the Spotlight button in the Menu Bar or Command Space to bring up Spotlight and just search for a file. You'll probably find the result you want. But there are a bunch of tips that might get you better results quicker. 

The first is to tell Spotlight that you specifically want to search for files. You can do this a couple of different ways. First, you can set Spotlight so it is only searching for files. The way to do that is to move your pointer up to Spotlight and you'll see four buttons appear to the right. The second one is for just files. If you click on that Spotlight changes into a mode that's only going to search for files. You can do the same thing by using Command Space then immediately pressing 2 on the keyboard or Command Space and then Command 2. This takes you to the same place here. You see it says Files at the top. You get some suggestions here. You get some Recents and you can scroll through these. Then, of course, you can just type and start searching. 

But there are two different modes here depending upon how you like to see your results. This is the Grid mode here. You can see all the icons displayed in a grid. But you can click here on the three dots button and Show as a List. When you do that you'll see everything with one result per line. So, all the suggestions here, Recents, and all of that. So pick whichever one you like better. 

Now let's try a search. I'm going to search for the word Example. You're going to see results here that all have example in the name. That may not be the case all the time because it is also looking in the Contents of the file. I'll show you later how to only search by name. With all these results here there is a lot to look through. You can narrow these results down by clicking on the one of the these Categories or Apps. So a lot of these are going to be apps like here's Pages for instance. Here's Keynote. But sometimes they are going to be general file categories like here's Folders and here's simply PDF. So if I click on PDF here you can see the results now change to be only PDF files and then it is still going to use the same text here. So here's some examples of somethings that don't actually even have that in the title. But you can bet they are in the contents of that file. Notice also when you get to this point it does change to List View even though the initial results were in Icon View. 

Now if you want to start off right away using one of these categories you certainly can. Before you type anything you can click on one of these, like let's click here on Numbers and then you'll see Numbers appear there and then you can type something to search for and you'll get results like this. 

But another way to do it, without actually clicking, is to type a slash, a regular forward slash, and then type either the app name or the file type, like PDF. Then press Return. Now you'll see that you're only going to get PDF results. Now you can type More to narrow it down to the contents or file name. 

The Slash can be used for something else as well. Something very useful. Previously when you searched in Spotlight it gave you results from all over your Mac. If wanted only results in a specific location you had to use a Search in the Finder. But, you can now tell it which folder to search in by using the Slash and then typing the folder's name. So I'm going to start typing documents here. You're going to see it's going to give me the first option there, Documents. I can select that with the keyboard or I just click on it and it's going to narrow searches now in that folder. So, if I type something else like this I'm only going to get results that are in my Documents Folder. You can use this for any folder name. So if you know you've got a folder, say, called Project Alpha, you can do slash Project Alpha and it will find that folder there, because you can see I've got two of them. So I can use the arrow keys and go down and select which one I want. I'll select this one and now it is only going to give me results in that folder. 

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Now sometimes you're searching for files and you can see the little icons here, either in Grid or List View. But you're not sure which one you want. So you can use the Arrow Keys to go down and select one here. You can see I get the full file name there at the top. But also when you're doing this, when you have that blue outline around one of them, you can press the Spacebar and this will bring up Quick Look. The same way that Quick Look is brought up in the Finder. You can then use the Spacebar again to dismiss it, go to another one, use Spacebar again to bring that one up. As a matter of fact, you can continue to use the arrow keys. I'll move Quick Look over to the side here. Notice that when I use the right arrow key it goes to the next item there and it allows me to move around inside of the results and still keep the Quick Look window up. You can resize Quick Look window. You can move Spotlight over like that. So if you really wanted to get some serious searching going on and have a nice preview of it here, you can just set things up like this and then continue to use the Arrow Keys to look around at your results. 

Now another thing you may want to do is instead of opening a file you may want to go to where it is located. You can use the Arrow Keys to get to where you want, like this file here, and instead of clicking on it or pressing Return, you can use either Command R or Command Return and instead of opening it, it will go to a new Finder window and show you that file. 

Now let's say you want to do a Spotlight Search, but not a new one. You want to do the same one you did three or four back. Right. You just want to repeat a search to find maybe a different file. Well, with the new Spotlight you have a History of your searches. So use Command Space to bring up Spotlight Search. If you want Command 2 just to focus on files. Now, use the Up Arrow Key. It shows you the previous search. You can keep using Up Arrow to go through all of your previous searches. So, for instance, I can go back to this one looking for PDF files with the word Example. Then press Return and it repeats that search.  

Now you may be looking for a way to go directly to the Files Section in Spotlight. You've got this button here, but then you need to click on Files. You've got Command Space but then you need to do Command 2. Well, wouldn't it be great if there was a way to go directly to it. In System Settings if you go to Keyboard and then from there to Keyboard Shortcuts, and then to Spotlight you'll have a way to go directly to Spotlight Search, to go to a Finder Window for Search or you can set one up to go right to the first section which just showed Apps. I hope in the future Apple adds slots for shortcuts to go to Files, Actions, and Clipboard. But until they do you can set this up in the Shortcuts App. So I"m going to launch Shortcuts here and Create a new shortcut. Let's call this Spotlight Files. I'm going to set a nice little icon here. I'll keep it gray. I'll search for a magnifying glass. Nice. So I've got that there. Now let's add an Action. Now there is an Action for Spotlight. Open Search. If you run this it brings up Spotlight Search. But it doesn't take you to the File Section. This is kind of handy to know about because you can actually pre-populate the search with some text here. 

But we're not going to use that because we want to go directly to File Search. Instead, we're going to search for Run JavaScript for Mac Automation and add some JavaScript coding here. It's only there lines. Here they are. It just tells Application System Events to issue keyCode 49, which is the Spacebar with the Command Key down. Then it is going to wait two secs of a second which I found will work to wait for the Spotlight Menu to appear. Then it is going to send another keyboard command 19, which is the number 2 with Command down. So when I run this it goes right to Files. So now I can do a few things with this. I can go to File and then I can Add to Dock. It will add it to the Dock, let me bring it out here over next to Applications, and now any time I want I can click it and it will go right to Files. I can also, though, go to the Details Section here on the right side of Spotlight. I can turn Off Show In Spotlight, of course. That's not needed. But I can add Keyboard Shortcut. Then let me add something like let's say, Control, Option, and F, for find. Now, I can quit Shortcuts here and do Control Option and F and bring up a File Search in Spotlight. 

Now my last tip is that even though you have this great way to search for Files using Spotlight, the king of searching for files is still Finder. Just open a new Finder window and then use Command F to start searching. You've got the search field here. You can also use that Option Command F, I pointed out earlier to jump right to this. Now you can search for something just like in Spotlight. But you get many more options. Right down here you can search this Mac or just the folder that you were in when you started the search. So you can narrow it down. You also can set Kind Is and set it to a different Kind but also change it from Kind to Created Date, Last Modified Date, Search the name only, Search Contents Only. Go to Other and search for tons of attributes for files. A lot of these apply to video and photo metadata, for instance. You can add multiple criteria here, even holding down the Option Key and creating little groups of criteria with Any, All, or None. So basically and, or, or not, here to really create some complex searches. Even save the search here, also known as a Smart Folder. 

So the Finder still is the most powerful way to search for files. Spotlight is simply the quickest. But here's one more bonus tip. It's how to make the Spotlight Menu search more like the Finder Search. You can do that if you know a few little tricks. You can go to a regular Spotlight Search and just type name colon and then some text and now it is only going to give you things that have that in the name. So the results here are only going to have the word example in the name. It's going to ignore the contents. 

You can also use boolean operators. So I can search for something like this example here. Then I can use and, or, or not. So I can say, and book. Now the results are going to be narrowed down by that. If I want it just to be the file name I can do that too. Now I'm only going to get results where the words example and book both appear. The key is to get accurate results you need to have this in Uppercase. AND all in uppercase. You can do OR as well and you can do NOT as well too. You'll get the right results. 

Oh, there is one more little new feature in Spotlight Search in macOS Tahoe. That is that you can now search on other Cloud Services, like DropBox and Goggle, and Microsoft and all that, if you setup one of those with your Mac. The Spotlight Search should actually reach out and give you results from those services, not just from your Mac and from iCloud. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.