How To Use the New Spotlight Applications Launcher

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's take a look at using Spotlight to launch apps in macOS Tahoe. 

In macOS Tahoe the Spotlight menu gets a complete overhaul. It has all sorts of new functionality including a mode that is specifically for launching apps. Now you may have already been using Spotlight to launch apps and if so you can continue to do so. The same way. You can press Command Space, start typing the name of the app, and once you get the app as your top hit there you can just press Return and it will launch the app. So it works the same as before if you were doing it that way. 

But now there is a mode specifically for apps which is great because instead of having Spotlight look for files, mail, messages, fonts, all sorts of other things you can just tell it just show me Apps. That's all I need to do right now. Quickly it will launch an app. This actually replaces Launchpad which is not a part of macOS Tahoe. So if you've used Launchpad before you're going to want to learn this new method of launching apps with Spotlight. 

So let's take a look at this new functionality in Spotlight. I'm going to bring up Spotlight by clicking on the icon for Spotlight in the Menu Bar. This will bring up Spotlight but notice it looks a little different. It's got the Search Field here to the left but also these four buttons here. This first button shows the Applications icon. So, as you can guess, this is what you would click to search for an Application. The others are for searching for files specifically, doing something called Actions, and also looking at the Clipboard History. But in this video we will just focus on Applications. 

If I click here I enter this special mode where it just shows me Applications in a grid. I can now use my mouse or trackpad, scroll through, and click on an application I want to launch, like Calculator. You can see then Spotlight goes away and the application launches. 

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Now there are many easier ways to get to this besides clicking the icon here and then clicking Applications. Notice, for instance, that you see the keyboard shortcut Command 1 appear here. As a matter of fact each of these has a keyboard shortcut. There's Command 2, Command 3, and Command 4. So instead of clicking here I can simply click to bring up Spotlight and then Command 1 takes me to Applications. But you probably don't want to combine a Click and a Keyboard Shortcut like that. You can instead use Command Space to bring up Spotlight and then Command 1 to go to Applications. Or just hold the Command Key down and do Space and then 1 to get there. Now, as you can imagine, there's an even quicker keyboard shortcut for that. But, you have to set it up. If you go to System Settings and then go down to Keyboard, go to Keyboard Shortcuts, now look for Spotlight. There's an entry here for Show Apps. You have to enable it and then you have to set it. So I'll double click in here and I'll set it to Control Command Space. That makes a nice set here. Command Space for Spotlight, Option Command Space for Find or Search, and then Control Command Space for Show Apps. 

If you were using Launchpad previously with a keyboard shortcut you may actually want to use the exact same keyboard shortcut used for Launchpad instead so that you map in your mind this new functionality to what Launchpad used to do. 

Now we can use Control Command Space and it takes me right to Applications and now I can click or just type and then Return to launch an app. It is faster than using Spotlight by itself because Spotlight isn't going to present you with the slight pause while it also looks for files and other things. 

There's also another way to get there and that is to use this Icon here in the Dock. This apps icon replaces Launchpad that was there previously and as you would expect you click it and it takes you right to the Application's launcher part of Spotlight. Now once you are in here you can launch the apps many different ways. You can scroll through this, find the app you want, and click it. You can narrow things down by typing a letter. If I type C it is going to show me all the apps that start with C first. But it is also going to include, in the results, apps that have C starting another word like Mission Control or  Image Capture. If I type more letters it will narrow things down more. I get Calculator and Calendar but notice I also get Image Capture here because of the ca in capture. If the item is the first one here, you can see how it is highlighted, I can just at that point press Return and it will launch that app. If not, if say it is Calendar I want to launch, I can continue to type until that's the only app there, or at least the first app, and then press Return to launch it. 

The other thing you can do is use the Arrow Keys. So I can use the arrow keys to go down and continue to go down, go to the right, go to the left, go up and find the app I want. It will even push scroll here to get to the app I want. So the Arrow Keys work as well. Whichever one is selected that's the one that will launch when you press Return. 

If you like you can switch from a grid to a list by clicking on the three dots button here and going to List View. Now, everything is just a vertical list which means you just use the down and up arrows to get to where you want. You also have Categories. Notice these Categories here in this Horizontal List. You can scroll through this Horizontal List. If I click Utilities it narrows everything down just to apps that are tagged as utilities. So, you've got Utilities here it shows you just utilities and you can continue to search like utilities that begin with the letter C like that. You can use the Delete Key to go back including getting rid of that tag. You can also select these with the keyboard. Remember how you used the down arrow to select the first item. In this case it would be Calculator. Well, if you use the right arrow it selects the first tag at the top and I can continue to go to the right. When I see the tag I want press Return and it adds that tag there to the top. So now I'm looking at Creativity Apps. Now I can choose type or use the down arrow to go into these apps here. The other arrow keys to select what I want and press Return.

When you start typing a name, if that is wrong you can Delete and go all the way back to the beginning. When you get back to the beginning pressing Delete again won't do anything. If you want to get back to the general search for Spotlight you would do that with the keyboard using the Escape Key. However, if you're using your Pointer here and you want to get back, if you move the pointer to the left you notice this goes to back arrow. You can click that to go back to the general Spotlight search. 

There are some other things you can do with these icons here in the Application Launcher besides launching them. So I can, Control Click, two-finger click on a trackpad, or right click on a mouse and I bring up a Context Menu. The first option is just Open. The second option, though, is Show In Finder. So this will take you to the Applications Folder or perhaps your User Applications Folder, if that's where the application is, and will select the app. Another option is to Get Info. This will simply bring up the Finder Info Window for that app. This could be useful if you need to see, say, the version number for that app. Another thing you can do is Share. Now it doesn't make sense to use most of these items here. It's actually going to attempt to actually Share the application itself. You're probably not going to want to send somebody an application. Let them install it on their own. But it could be useful, say, in odd situations like perhaps you've created a shortcut that takes an Application as the input and then does something based on that. 

In addition, if you have an application selected, like Calculator here, you can press the Spacebar and it will bring up QuickLook. So you get to see a big version of the icon and also the version number and how much space it has taken up and also the last modified date. You get an Open button here as well. Another thing you can do is with an Application selected use Command R and that will take you to the Application location just like that Context Menu Command did. 

There are some settings for Spotlight as well. Let's go to System Settings here and then let's look for Spotlight on the left. There is where you would tell Spotlight what it should show you in the results and what it shouldn't. Most of these things don't apply for searching for Applications except all the way at the bottom Results From System Apps. The strange thing about this is if you turn this Off and then you use Spotlight, Command 1, to go to Applications it still shows everything here. But if you Search, like with C, it shows you no results. So it kind of works but I don't know why you would want to turn off apps and then use the Application Launcher anyway. 

More importantly there is this option here, for iPhone Apps. If you have this turned On and you are using iPhone Mirroring on your Mac, then you're going to get iPhone App in the results as well. You may not want that. You may still want to use iPhone Mirroring. You may still want to, sometimes, launch apps that are from the iPhone. But you may not want the results in the Application Launcher. It would be cluttered with the hundreds of apps you have installed on your iPhone. 

You may miss the ability to be able to customize a list like this by arranging the apps like you want and having folders. You can't do that with this. This is a simple list, very similar to the Application Library that's in iOS and iPad OS. It's just a list of all of your apps. You can search for what you want and launch it. If you really want to be able to customize what you launched your first tool should be the Dock down here at the bottom. You can still customize this with your most commonly used apps. The Spotlight application launcher can tie into that because you can drag from here to the Dock to easily add apps to the Dock. 

Unfortunately though you can't drag into the Spotlight Application Launcher like you could with Launchpad. So I've got this image here. I can drag it into the Dock and into an app that accepts an image. But if I bring up the Application Launcher in Spotlight I can't drag and drop it onto an app. 

There's one more interesting thing here that I would point out that I don't think is fully baked yet. If you go to List View for Applications and you go down to an app like say Mail, or let's narrow it down and just go to Keynote notice here in List View it says, Search Keynote and tab is the Keyboard Shortcut or I can just click here. Then it puts the Tag Keynote here. It seems now I should be able to search for a Keynote document, like that, and it should find it. But it doesn't. It also doesn't work to search inside the app. Like searching inside of Mail. It just doesn't seem to work now. But if I were to do a regular Spotlight Search, like this, and search for something and then here at the top look for Keynote, it has the Tag there, keeps the word I was searching for, and it does give me the result that I want. Notice how it looks exactly the same as it did before but it works in a General Spotlight search, not if you start with Applications. It seems like it should work either way. So hopefully this is a bug that will be fixed in the near future as it is an interesting way to use Spotlight as it is. It would just be nice to be able to start here from Applications, find the applications, and search that way. 

Another thing you may miss from Application Launcher is the ability to click and hold, or Control Click, on the app icon, like this, and then get a lists of all of your apps. If you miss that you can get it back pretty easily just by going to your Applications Folder and actually going up one level and there's Applications. Drag that to the right side of the Dock and now you can click here and see all of your Apps. In fact you can Control Click and set this to a List, like that. Now you've got a handy Application Launcher in the Dock that is similar to how that Launchpad icon worked before. 

I'm going to be doing a video in the future of all the different ways you can get back some of the functionality from Launchpad using the standard features of macOS Tahoe. No third party apps needed. Also in the future I'll be taking a look at the other new aspects of Spotlight, like the Action and Clipboard History. 

Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.