Dealing With Big Sur Spotlight Previews and Other Problems

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let's take a look at what's wrong with the Spotlight window in macOS Big Sur. 

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So the Spotlight window is what you get when you use Command Space to bring up a search field on your Mac. This has been around for awhile and you can use it to start a search for files on your Mac. But you could also use it for things like launching applications, getting information for things like weather, movie theaters, doing calculations, doing conversions. There are all sorts of things that the Spotlight window can do. But unfortunately in macOS Big Sur there are some changes to the Spotlight window. It doesn't work as well as it used to. There are two main problems.

First, let's start by bringing it up with Command Space. Now let's say we want to search for a file. So I'll start typing the file name. The results I get look different than if I was using Catalina or an earlier version of macOS. I get a list of results but what I'm missing is a Preview of the selected result. You just see a list. There's no preview on the right. The preview isn't gone completely however. You now have to use the Tab key to bring it up. So there's an extra step if you want to preview window. Now there is one legitimate reason why this change was done. That's to speed things up. Generating previews like this takes time. Depending upon the type of item, whether it's a file, looking up something online, performing a calculation, it's going to take a little bit of time, a little bit of processor power, a little bit of battery power, to generate that preview. If you use Spotlight a lot but don't necessarily need those previews then it was generating that preview without any real benefit for you but with some minuses. So the idea is you use the Tab key to bring it up if you want to see it. If you don't want to see it it's not going to take the time to generate the preview. 

Now once you've hit the Tab key I can now use the Down arrow to move between the items and I'll see a preview for each one of those. So you don't have to hit Tab every single time. You just hit Tab once. So if you don't like the fact that previews don't appear by default unfortunately there's no way to change that. The work around is just to get used to pressing the Tab key when you've completed typing your term. It's really not that big a deal. It's easy to hit the Tab key but it is annoying. It does take some getting used to if you were happy how it worked before where the previews just appeared automatically. I wish Apple would add at least a preference to have previews appear automatically. 

Now another problem that people complain about is a new section that appears in Spotlight. You could see here at the top I have a section of Top Hits. So these are the things that are the most obvious results. In this case it gets it right. It finds the document I'm looking for. But below that there's a section of suggestions. These suggestions include either other Spotlight searches or web searches. Now web searches we had before. It's nice and easy to be able to go and use one of these and access a web search. But these are other Spotlight searches that are suggested as results. Now sometimes they could be useful. But the one thing that they definitely do is they push down the real result further in the window. Now let me type another search but I'm not going to complete a word. I'm just going to type the first four letters. Now what I'm going to get here are a few hits at the top. Then I'm going to get a list of suggestions and I could use one of those to complete the word. But what if I don't want to complete the word. What if the result is just down here. It's a little further down. Well, I just have to skip past all of these to get to the actual result. Worse yet there's no way to turn these off. As you probably know you can go into System Preferences and into Spotlight and here under Search Results you can determine exactly what shows up in the Spotlight window. So for instance if you find a lot of emails and messages appearing and you never really want to see those in Spotlight you could turn that off and that section will go away. You have sections for just about everything. But you don't have a section for Suggestions. There are Siri Suggestions which are things like weather and movie information. But there's no section here for regular suggestions. 

I think Apple really needs to add this here so those things don't appear. Now one workaround is to get better at using the Spotlight window with its keyboard shortcuts. If you use the Down arrow you have to go line-by-line through everything. But if you use Command Down then it jumps section by section. You could quickly get to what you want. When you're in a section you can use the Up and Down arrows to move item by item. Another workaround for that is to not use the Spotlight window for searching at all. Using Command Space brings up the Spotlight window. But Command Option Space brings up a Finder window with Search already selected. Then you can type what you're looking for here and it does just a file search. The only result the Finder is going to show you are Files and Folders. You're not going to see all the other stuff that you would see in Spotlight Menu. So if you know you're looking for a file before it was really convenient to just use Spotlight for everything. But now it's probably more convenient to just go straight to a Finder search  with Command Option Space instead of Command Space. 

Now the problems don't end there. It's now a little harder to actually get real information. Like for instance if I type weather I'm going to see the weather there but it's not going to be the top hit anymore. I find if I type things like weather and space and the name of a city then it becomes the top hit. I still don't see detailed information until I hit the Tab key to get the preview there. The same thing for Sports Results. I'll get that little bit of information there but I have to hit Tab to bring up the preview. One of my favorite things to do with the Spotlight window is to do calculations. So when you do a  calculation like that you still get the result but it appears on a thin little line and you have to use Tab to actually get a larger view of it. If you do conversions you only get a single conversion on that line. So, for instance, if I do $8.50 I can see I get a conversion to Euros there. But pressing Tab will give me four more conversions under that. The same thing with distances and other measurements. You get a single conversion there. A Tab will give you more options. It's not a big deal. It's just something we have to live with now. We've got to hit the Tab key. What's a little more infuriating is if you Edit this it's going to go back to the window without the preview. I can hit Tab again to bring up the larger preview. 

So on the one hand it feels like a step backwards. Maybe it is a little faster because it doesn't need to generate the preview but I haven't noticed. What I have noticed is it seems to take a few weeks for me to get used to Spotlight working like this. Now that I'm used to it I kind of hit Tab automatically so I don't notice the change as much. But those suggestions continued to be annoying. I'm hoping Apple addresses this with changes or at least some Settings, even some hidden settings that we can change using the Terminal would be preferable to just leaving it like this from now on. Until then get used to hitting Tab, used to using Command Down arrow to jump quickly through results, and get used to using Command Option Space to go right to a file search instead of using Spotlight window for that.