10 Useful Spotlight Actions

Hi, this is Gary at Macmost.com. Let's take a look at Quick Actions in Spotlight. So a big new productivity feature in macOS Tahoe is the ability to launch Quick Actions using Spotlight. One way to do this is to click on the Spotlight icon in the Menu Bar. Then you can just start typing the Quick Action here or you can click on the third button on the right and you can see that will take you directly to Actions and show you the actions here and eliminate your search to just Actions. You can also do the same thing with Command Space to bring up Spotlight Search and then Command 3 to go to Actions or just simply Command Space and then 3. Then you'll get this long list of actions broken up mostly by app. Let's take a look at 10 examples of how these can be useful. 

Let's start off by setting a timer. There's an Action down here, if you scroll down to the clock area, for Start Timer. Now you don't have to scroll down here and click on this. You can just start typing. So Start Timer. You can see it is the first item at the top, Start Timer. At that point you can just press Return. Now you've entered the Quick Action. Most Quick Actions will ask you for some parameters. In the case a duration number and minutes. Usually you don't need to move your fingers off your keyboard to use these. For instance for this one I can just type, say, 5, and then at that point I can just press Return and start the timer for 5 minutes. I can also tab to the second parameter here and it shows me a list of options. I can start typing one or I can use the down arrow to select one of these options here. Let's just select Minutes and press Return and now you can see the complete command. Another Return will launch it. You can see here at the top is shows that the Timer has been started. If I go into the Clock app and look at Timers you can see there is my timer.  

It simply added a timer to the Clock App without ever launching the Clock App. There are plenty other Quick Actions that involve the Clock App. For instance setting an alarm. Instead of setting here in the Clock App I can just do Set Alarm. Notice here I didn't go to the Action section. I used the default catch all for Spotlight, Command Space, and then I search for set an alarm. It's the second option here and I arrow down to it. Press Return. Now create Alarm for a time, say 5:00 o'clock, and I can leave it something like this and then add the alarm. You can see how it added the alarm there in the Clock App. 

Note once you've used a Quick Action like Start Timer notice you might see some characters here on the right. These are Quick Keys and they were originally just blank. But the first time you use Quick Action it will assign some Quick Keys, in this case a ST to it. You can also click here assign your own You can also delete them or you can change them. Once you've got some Quick Keys set there  and you notice that you no longer need to type a part of the name. You can just use those exact characters. So here in Spotlight I'll use ST and you can see that is going to be the first item that appears here. I can press Return and get right to it. 

Let's jump right to a really interesting one. You can actually manipulate files using Spotlight.You can do this by first selecting what you want in the Finder. So, for instance, I want to move this file, right here, into this folder. In this example it would be easy to Drag & Drop. But let's say this second location isn't somewhere that is visible here in this window. It's in a very different place. Now I can use Spotlight with that file selected and I can use the Move File action. You can see it's right here. Press Return and it allows me to see the current selection area. It will even show me down here what the current selection is so I can confirm it's go the right thing. So If I were to simply tap over to the next item there it will ask for a Folder. This is a Search Field and I can search and it will come up with a list of results for folders. In this case this is the one I want. So, I can select that and I can see the full command there and you can see that it read it and actually moved this file from here to here. If I didn't have a file selected I can use Move File and you can see a F has been assigned here. So let's just use an F and then Return and now I can search for the file. So I can search for city here and I can find the right one and then search for the folder and move it like that. So I didn't have to have the files or folders.This will do it all to make a move. One similar to that is the lead file. So with three files selected here I can look for Delete files and you can see it says current selection three files. If I press Return it will move those three files to the trash. 

Now you saw with Start Timer and Set Alarm it didn't even need to launch the Clock App to set those. You can do the same with other apps. For instance, I can send a message and then I can type the message and who it is to. If there are several here I can select the one I want and it will actually send the message. You can see a little indicator that it has been done right there. It never launched the Messages App. So it is a quick way to send messages. You can also use it to send email. You can type a message and then the subject and one or more recipient and it will send the email without ever launching the Mail app. 

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You can also use the Maps App without launching the Maps App. So one of the things you can do is type Get Travel Time. You get a bunch of parameters. Like for instance you can change driving to walking. You can set current location or some other location and then it will run. It will get you a travel time. Just simple hours and minutes. But if you do want to get actual directions then you can use Open Directions, like this, search for a destination. Simply press Return and it will launch the Maps App and show you those directions. You can also create a new Calendar event without launching Calendar. So look for the Quick Action, New Event and then you add a title and start an end time. Something like this will do. Then Press Return and then go into Calendar and I look and see the event right here. 

Now you may be wondering if there is an action to search for an event in the Calendar. There is not an Action for that because that is a search. That's primarily what Spotlight does. You could use Spotlight Search for that. The way to do it is to start typing the name of the app. So like Calendar. Now if I were to press Return it would assume that I want to launch the Calendar app. But in fact what to do is search for information in the Calendar. So instead of pressing Return I'm going to press the Tab Key. Now you can see how the Calendar App there at the top becomes this kind of search parameter. You can still type after it. So if I were to type dentist then it would come up with a list of an event found in the Calendar that match that. Then of course you can do the same thing you do for Calendar for Reminders as well. Do New Reminder, like this and then you can add a new reminder to, and you get to choose the list here if you have multiple lists, and then you press Return and it will add it to Reminders. Just like with Calendar events you can use the name of the app and then tab to search for a reminder. 

You can easily add an existing note or create a new one. So in Spotlight look for Append To Note. Run that and then type whatever the text is, like that, tap over to Note and you'll see a list of your Notes. You can start typing or select whatever you want. Probably your most recent note is going to be at the top there. So it would be pretty easy. Run it and it will run it and you'll see the little indicator there at the top. Always look for that. Now if I look in my Notes you can see it added that line. You can also create a new note very easily with Create Note and then it is going to ask for contents. Remember the first line of a note is going to be the title. So this will end up being the title of the new note. You go over here to a folder and you've got various folders that you have created there. I'll add it here and you can see it has created that note. Then I can add to the note by using Append To Note and type something and then the note like that and you can see I've created the note and I started adding lines to it. 

Now not all these Actions work as well as they should. Now there is an Action for Convert Image. So I'm going to look for that and there it is. Now I'm going to press Return and notice  it has current selection there as the first parameter. It even shows me, underneath, what it thinks the current selection is. So that's correct. I'm going to tap to the next parameter here and continue everything I can convert it to. I'm going to use JPEG and I'm going to press Return. What do I get as a result? Well, I get to view a JPEG version of that file. It doesn't actually save a copy next to the real one. It does actually save the copy. If you Control Click, right click, or two-finger click on this you could open the new version it created, copy it to the Clipboard, and you can also show it in the Finder. If I do that it is going to show me it put it in the Downloads Folder and called it attachment.jpeg. It did do the conversion it just put it in a weird place. 

Likewise there is also a Quick Action for Resize. It works the same way. Use the current selection and I can run it and I will get a resized image, like that. I can show in Finder. You can see it is still going to save it to the Downloads folder. 

You can also do some text manipulation with Spotlight. So one thing you can do is Replace Text. Then you can type what you want to replace and with what and then the text to look in, like that. Then you get the result and you can control click on it and copy the result. You can actually use this in text that you've selected. So I'm going to select all this text here in an email message. Now I'm going to Command Space and then Replace Text and then notice it says, selected text. Well I don't want that to be the first parameter. But that's okay. I'll just take fox and I'll go to the next parameter and you can see it moved Selected Text to the next thing. So I'll type there and then tab and it moves selected text yet over again. That's where I want it to be. I'll press Return and now I've got the new text here. I can Control Click on it. Copy and then I can Paste it in here if I want.  While this works in some apps that the updated macOS Tahoe came out it doesn't yet work in others. For instance here it won't work in Pages. You can see it just doesn't get the selected text. You also can get quickly to Markup Tools so you can select a PDF or image here and then Command Space and just say Markup and you can see it looks for the current selection or you can type and Search for it and it will go right into Quick Look in Markup mode for whatever that file is. 

Here's a bonus one. You can run a Shell Script right from Spotlight. So you don't need Terminal for a quick single command. I'll look for Run and Shell Script and I will run this. It asks me for a script to run. So I can type something like Network Quality to test the network. This actually takes about a minute to run in Terminal so it is going to take a minute to run here as well. Then you can see here are the results of this. Now that I've used it once it is going to be a lot easier because it has assigned a set of Quick Keys RSS and you can change that to whatever you want. So I can type RSS and then return and then just type or paste in a command like this one will show me the top four processes running on my Mac. 

The last tip I want to show is that if you've got Quick Keys setup for one of these, like RSS, you can just do Space and then put in the parameter that is there. It is a single parameter like this. So I never had to press Tab or select the item. I could just run this and it is going to assume that what comes after the Quick Keys is the parameter.

Remember there are a lot more of these in Spotlight. Use Command 3 to go to Actions here and scroll through this really long list. Try these out and experiment with them. See which ones can be useful to you.