A Guide To Using Spotlight On a Mac

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's take a look at all that Spotlight can do on your Mac. 

Spotlight is a keyboard based multi-tool on your Mac that can be used for all sorts of different things. You can launch it in the Menu Bar by clicking on the Spotlight icon, like this. But you can also launch it using the keyboard with Command Space. When you first bring it up it's just a single line text field like this. You can use it to search for things. A lot of different things. For instance you can use it to search for a file like this. You'll see results appear below. It's going to find files that have what you type in the name of the file. But it is also going to look for files that have that text in the contents of the file. When you do a simple search like this you can use your Pointer and simply click on the file that you want to open. It will just open the file. You can also use your keyboard, so the down arrow will start going through the content that's there and with the selection highlighted you can press return and it will open up that document. 

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When you first bring up Spotlight this is kind of a Universal search here. It will do anything that Spotlight does in this mode. So you can search for files like I just showed you. But it'll also find content in your other data. Things that aren't files. For instance, if I search for restaurants, like that, it will find files with that in it, but it will also find email messages. You can see the first result there is actually an email message. You can see the little icon there to the left. If I press Return here it will launch the Mail App and go to that message. It will do the same thing to find messages in the Messages App or events in the Calendar App, like that. It will find items in the Reminders App, like that. It will even search inside of your Photos Library for something. So, for instance, I can search for giraffe and it will find lots of files that match that as well. But if I go further down here you can see it finds a result in the Photos App too. This isn't a photo that's labeled giraffe. This is a photo that just happens to have a giraffe in it. Spotlight can tell that from looking at the photo. You can even search inside your Safari Bookmarks & History, like this, and you can go right to that bookmarked history item. You can also search for a Setting. So, for instance, if I search for Hover I can quickly get to the Hover text or Hover Typing settings in System Settings. So with universal mode in Spotlight, what you get when you just use Command Space is very powerful and you can do most things that you can do in Spotlight in this mode. I'm going to show you some more specific examples later on. But let's move on to the four very specific modes of Spotlight. 

You'll see these if you bring up Spotlight and then move the Pointer like this, or if you just click on the Icon in the Menu Bar and they show these four specific modes. First is Applications. You can see there's a keyboard shortcut there, Command 1 to take you to that. But you can also click on this Icon here in your Dock to go to it. This icon would have replaced Launchpad if you had that in the Dock previously. The easiest way to bring it up with the keyboard is Command Space and while still holding Command down then press 1 and it goes into Applications Mode. This is a search mode just like the Universal Search Mode. But it is only going to show you Applications as results. So if we start typing something, like I'll type the letter p it will show me the Applications that start with the letter p or have some other match. So, for instance, you can see QuickTime Player, the second word starting with p. That shows up here as well. Note you can change this from Icon View to List View right here if you want. But either way you can use the Arrow Keys to move around and select an app that you want and then simply press Return to launch that app, like that. I think the way most people will use this is simply to just start typing the name of the app until the app is the first item there. Then just press Return and it will launch that app. Note you can do the same with Universal Search. You don't have to go into Apps Mode to do this. If I type calc here it is going to come up with Calculator as the first selection and I can press Return. But if you want to make sure you're only launching apps going into App Mode is the best way to do that. 

You can also narrow things down by Category. Here you've got a list of suggestions at the top. So it is trying to predict what it is you're about to launch. Then you've got these categories here. You can click here and you'll see it gives you the category, Photo & Video, and you can see the suggestions here. You can use Escape to go back.

Now let's take a look at the second mode. This is Command 2 or click on this button. This is just Files. If you know you want to just find a file you can go into this mode with Command Space and then Command 2. Here it's going to show you suggestions at the top. It's going to show you Recently Opened Files below that. You can also select Categories here at the top. Most of the time you're just going to start to type the name of the file, like that, and see what it comes up with. Like with Apps you can switch to List Mode, which might be more useful as you get all this information about each file. Here you also get a clue by looking at the icon on the left you'll see the document icon and then the App that is set to open this one by default. You can use the Arrow Keys to navigate around it here and press Return to open this file. You can also do some other things with the current selection. If you use Command R, for instance, it will take you to the file instead of opening it. Another thing you can do is you can press the Spacebar to use QuickLook to preview the file. You can press Spacebar again to dismiss it. Go to another file, Spacebar to preview it again. But you can also move QuickLook off to the side and then continue to use the Up and Down Arrows to preview the file while you also have Spotlight still open.

Now in this mode you can also narrow down by Type. For instance, if I know I want to open a Numbers document I can just click on Numbers here. It is only going to show me results that will be opened by that app. There's a shortcut for that. That's to use Slash, the forward slash, and then just start typing the name of the app, like that. Once you see it selected press Return. So I can now start searching based on both the app and the name or contents. Some of these are app names like Numbers. Others are things like PDF, a file type. But another thing you can do here is use slash and then type the folder. If you know, for instance, that the file is in a folder called Examples I could start typing that. It's going to show me Folders, like that. I can move with the Arrow Keys up and down through them and if I know this is the right folder, the Examples folder in my Documents folder, I can press Return and it is going to narrow down my results based on that. So I can see the files that are in Examples. So if I now search further with some text you'll see I get results there, both for the name and the contents. 

Some quick advance tips here: if you do name colon then it's only going to find things where that's in the name. If you want to use and, or, not, you can do them just use all capitals. So if I do AND name document like that you can see it gives me results like that. But if I do OR, like that, then you can see it's going to give me things that have test or document in the title. If I use NOT you can see it will give me things that have test in the name but not things that have document in the name. 

Now we come to the third mode, which is Actions. Actions are special things that you can do right from Spotlight. When you just go to Actions here you get a big list starting with suggestions and then broken up in Categories, usually by App. So you get an idea of what's possible. All you need to do is just start typing the name of the Action. So, for instance, if I wanted to start a timer, you can see Start Timer there. I can also just type Timer and you can see it figures out that's the most likely one and then I press Return. Now Spotlight is going to prompt me for a duration. So I can say 10 minutes and if I press Return it is going to start the timer. You can see it up here. The timer is actually running in the Clock App. Some other examples are Type Alarm and you see you can add an alarm for a time and give it a name. You can see the first suggestion right there. Send Message. You can use that and you can type the message and then who you want it to go to. Of course the Messages App is going to be used to send this but you can do it from Spotlight without even opening up the Messages App. If I type email you you see I can also send an email with a Subject and to whomever I want without opening the Mail App. You can search for Calendar and you can see you can create a New Calendar event, the second one here, like that. You give it a title. You can give it a start time and an end time and it will add it without having to go to Calendar right now. You can even control your files and folders this way. For instance, here I've got this file and I'm going to select it. Instead of Dragging & Dropping it to this other folder called Demo, I'm going to use Spotlight. Do Command 3 to go to Actions and I'm going to type Move. You can see I can move File and press Return. Now it will show Current Selection and actually list the current selection underneath. I can just press Return to accept that. Now it is going to ask for Folder. I'm going to start typing the name of a Folder and I can see the one I want to move to right there. I can press Return, select that, and then Return again will move the file. 

Now note something when you go to the Action section. There is this thing on the right that says, Add Quick Keys for creating a new event. I can say CNE for Calendar New Event. Press Return. Now I don't have to type new event to get here. I can just type CNE and it knows this is the one I want. In fact it will work in the regular Universal Mode of Spotlight Search. You can see it brings that up first. Note also that Start Timer has a set of Quick Keys there, ST, and I didn't even apply that. It just noticed I was using it so it picked out some Quick Keys for me. But I can click on it and change it if I want. 

You can make your own by going into Shortcuts and then with any shortcut, like I'll go into this one. If I go to Details here I can choose to Show In Spotlight. I can run this shortcut here from Spotlight Action. So I'll do Command Space Command 3 and start typing Image and there's image and there's Image of the Day, my shortcut which I can run and even assign a Quick Key to. If you really want to get into it you can define Input Fields in your shortcut as well. So Spotlight prompts you for information and then performs the Action. Just like sending a message or setting a reminder.

Now let's look at the 4th mode of Spotlight. That is Clipboard. This gives you a History of your Clipboard. So let's add things to the Clipboard. So in this Pages document I will Copy some text here, I'll Copy some other text here, and I will Copy some other text here. Now let's go into Spotlight and I'll use Command 4 to go to Clipboard. You can see each of those things has been saved in a History here. You can recall any of them by just using the Arrow Keys or clicking and it will actually Paste it into whatever it is you're working on. You can also click this button here to the right to make it the Current Clipboard and you can also Control Click, right click or two-finger click on any of these to Paste, Copy, in other words make it the current item, or Delete that item. You can also click on the three dots here and Clear all of the history. It even works with images. I can select an area of this image, Command C to copy and if I look in Spotlight, History you can see it has saved that image there. So you can use it to Copy and Paste things from graphic to graphic. It works with Files. I can select this file, Command C to copy, go into another folder and, you know of course I can Command V to paste a copy in here. Notice that the file is also saved in this history. 

The History is only saved for eight hours! It tries to avoid saving passwords in here at all. But it is super handy to have especially if you just need the very basics of a Clipboard Manager now you've got that built into macOS and you don't need a third party app for that, although there are a lot of great Clipboard Managers out there that do other things as well. 

So beyond the four modes of Spotlight, Spotlight still does a lot of other things. Things that it has done for years. So if I bring it up just with a Command Space I can still do math calculations here. You can do something simple like this and you can see how it gives you a result. But you can actually do pretty complex things. Like, for instance, if I wanted to use parentheses to get a result like that I could. You can do conversions in Spotlight. So for instance I can say 60 cm for centimeters and it will convert to inches. But I can also do, say, as feet and it will give me it in feet. It will even do multi-unit conversions. So, 30mpg, miles per gallon, will convert to 7.84 liters per 100 kilometers. It can do currency conversions as well. If I type $100 it will convert it to euros. If I did 100 and then typed euro, like that, it will give me dollars. You can use different currencies like that. It is looking this up in real time so this is pretty up-to-date as well. 

Speaking of looking things up you can look up stock prices by just typing the symbol, like that. You can get Weather by just typing weather and you'll see it appear there, or type In and the name of the city, like that. You can type words like that and if it is a long enough, uncommon enough word it is going to assume you want a definition, like that. Otherwise for more common words you could type define and that will put the definition up there at the top. Otherwise you would have to scroll down to get to it. Another handy one is Time In and then give it a city and it will tell you the current time there. You can look up flights by typing the flight number, like that, you can see the results right there and if I press Return over that you can see I get all sorts of information and I'm still right here in Spotlight. You can get sport scores by typing the name of the team. If you try Showtimes then you'll find movie showtimes here, so like that, and it will tell you local showtimes as well as other information about the movie. You can lookup locations, like that, and you can see you get a link to the Maps App. 

Now if you just want to do a web search you can start it in Spotlight and then, as soon as you're done typing use Command B and it will jump right to Safari and do that search with your default Search Engine. 

Alright, so here are two more things that Spotlight does that you may not know about. First is that you can activate Menu items from it. So you can go to the Menu, of course, or use keyboard shortcuts to activate a menu item. But you may not remember where it is. So, I'm going to select the test and then I'm going to use Spotlight. I'm going to Search for Strikethough. Notice one of the results that has this little Menu Bar icon there and it even shows the App. If I were to press Return to use it you can see it executes that Menu item. Here's another cool thing that Spotlight does. There's a history of everything you've searched for. So I'm going to use Command Space and I'm going to use the Up Arrow. It is going to show me the last thing I searched for. I'm going to continue to use Up Arrow to see what else I searched for recently. You can just keep going back. So if you've already typed out something long and you searched for it before you can use the Up Arrow just to get right back to it. 

I'm going to finish by going into Settings. In System Settings there are two places you should look to customize Spotlight. The first, of course, is to look in Spotlight. You've got some buttons up here to reset Quick Keys if you want. Also there's that History I just showed you. You can Delete the History. If you go down here you can see all the different kinds of results you get. So, for instance, if you find you're getting lots of results from the Books App, or say from Podcasts, and it is just getting in the way of things, you can turn these Off. In addition to these items here there's some System Results, like for instance, if you don't want to see apps or any documents or folders in Spotlight you can turn those Off. Also, it might be handy to turn Off iPhone apps. That way you won't see iPhone App next to your Mac Apps and launch the iPhone Mirroring App to run those. Then also here's a switch for the Clipboard Search. So if the Clipboard items aren't coming up you might have this turned Off. This button here at the bottom is very important. If you click that and go into it you can add files and folders to this to tell Spotlight I don't want you to look in here. It's really handy if you've got apps that store a ton of cash information in a certain location and it is always coming up in your results for files. You can just add that to Spotlight and you'll never see results there. 

Now the other place you should look is you should go to Keyboard and then click on the Keyboard Shortcuts button here. There is an area here for Spotlight. You can find the Command Space shortcut here and you can change it if you want. Also you can set a keyboard shortcut that goes right to the first mode, the Apps Mode of Spotlight. So as you can see Spotlight is a very powerful tool and more powerful starting with macOS Tahoe than ever before. It's worth your while to explore all the different things it can do and start using some of those to boost your productivity.

Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.