How To Use Spotlight Actions In macOS Tahoe

Hi, this is Gary with mapost.com. Let me show you how to use Spotlight Actions.

So a new feature in macOS Tahoe 26 is called Spotlight Actions. The idea is that instead of just searching for something you can actually perform some actions using apps on your Mac. You can do some of this before but now it has it's own section and is pretty well defined. So let me show you how it works.

To bring up Spotlight you can click the Spotlight icon in the Menu Bar or use Command Space. To get to the Actions Section you can move your pointer and you'll see four different sections of Spotlight. The third one is Actions. You can use Command 3 to get there as well. Then it lists some of the actions you can perform. There is a long list here. What you see is going to depend on which apps you have installed although a lot of these are for the built-in apps in macOS. A simple example would be this one. Random Number. Let's double click it and you'll see that it is not just going to perform an action it is going to first prompt you for input. In this case a minimum number and a maximum number. I'll type one for the first parameter, Tab, and then type ten for the second and then Return to execute the action. I get a random number. As a neat bonus it stays there and I can press Return again to run it again. So I can just keep generating random numbers like that. I can press Escape to escape out of it and get back to Actions and escape again to go back to the regular Spotlight Search. 

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Here's another example. Instead of scrolling through the list I'm just going to start searching for it. I want to do something in Messages and if I just type Message there I'll see some results. One of those is Send Message which is exactly what I want to do. So I'll press Return and now I can type a message and a recipient. So, I'll type Hi, Tab over here then type a recipient. If it doesn't know who I mean it will give me a list and I'll just choose the first one. You can use the arrow keys to select if you want. I'll press Return and it will send that message. It never even launched the Messages App. But if I look at the Messages App now I'll see that it indeed did send the message. 

Now let's say you use one of these often. You can assign a Quick Key to it so you can get to it even easier with more accuracy. So we've got that message one. We can see here that next to each one of these is an Add Quick Keys. Notice how, since we've used Send Message it assigned SM taking the first letter of each word here as a Quick Key. So now we can use SM instead of searching for send message. We could also click in here and define our own. So let's say we want to use MM instead because maybe we used SM for something else. So I'll use that. Now I can go to Spotlight and just with regular Spotlight if I want, or I can go first to the Actions Section. I can type MM and then Return and get to this useful functionality.

There are plenty of other actions you can take that are built-in. Most of these are for a specific app. So they are listed by app. You'll see different things here depending upon your apps. For instance I've got Excel and Word installed and there is a couple of things they provide. But things with Notes you should see the same things that I do as well. There's also a lot under Other. These are mostly things that are provided by the Shortcuts App. But in addition to this you can create your own Shortcuts and we'll take a look at that in a minute. So, look through these and see which ones may be useful to you and try them out. 

For instance, here's on called Create Note that allows you to quickly create a note and put it in whatever folder you want. I'll just have it in the main folder there. You can see it opens up the Note App and there's the new note with the name I assigned to it as the title there. If I search for Mail I'll find that there is Sent email. I can send a message with the subject to recipients right here in Spotlight. 

Some of the Actions are contact sensitive. So here is a file I've selected in a Finder Window. Now if I bring up Spotlight, go to Actions here and search for Move I'll find an action called Move File. I'll press Return to use that and it will recognize that my current  selection there is that file. You can see it named right here. I can press return to accept that. But now it needs a destination. I'll start typing the name of a folder and it will give me some results there. I'll type Return to accept the first result and it will run and perform that action. It shows me the results here which in this case is just a the image that was moved. So now I can look here in this Demo Folder and you can see it did, in fact, move or actually duplicate and move that file. 

Another contact sensitive one would be the Count Action. I can select a bunch of files here. I can go to Spotlight Actions, Search for Count, and then press Return. It will shoe me seven items are selected, which is a bit of a spoiler. But you can see it says Count Items in Current Selection. I can press Return and it gives me 7. But here, if I've got text selected in Text Edit and I use Count it's going to take the selected text as the input and I can actually do Shift and Tab to go backward here to that items parameter. Let's go down to words. Put Words and then Return for selected text. Now you can see it tells me there are 9 words selected. So the same Action, Count, can count files, it can count words, and other things. 

Here's one more example. I've selected four images here. I'll go to Spotlight Actions and I'll search for combined. There is Combined Images. I'll press Return and you can see there are four images. I'll press Return to accept those four images. But now I'm going to Tab over to where it says Horizontally. Press Delete to Clear that and now you can see I actually have three options there. Horizontally, Vertically, or in a Grid. I'll press Return for In A Grid and it will Return those four items now combined in a grid. I can drag this out as a File like that, or press just Return again and it is actually going to Open Up the combined image now in Preview as a new document. 

Now all the existing Quick Actions are great but the real power here is that you can create your own. You use the Shortcuts App to do that. So as a simple example I've created a Shortcut called Synonym. I've set in the details here that it is to show in Spotlight and receive input from Spotlight. So now it is going to Receive Input and I've set it to only Text. You see it says Search Result which is what you get when you check this. Then it is going to use a new action in macOS Tahoe called Use Model. So it is going to use an AI model with a prompt and it is this prompt right here, pretty basic just asking it to give me a list of synonyms but the point of the prompt where I have word or phrase I actually take the Shortcut Input and put that in there. Then I can set it to Apple Intelligence, which is using Apple Servers, on device only which is using Apple Intelligence, but just on my Mac. So it is not calling out to the Internet. I can actually be off-line. Or call out to ChatGPT. So this is a handy little shortcut that will give you a synonym without having to go to the Thesaurus and it might give you different words and maybe more words because it is using AI instead of a hard coded list in the dictionary.

Now the name of this is Synonym and since I have selected it to show in Spotlight and receive input from Spotlight I can see it when I go to Actions here and I start searching for it. So it comes up right there. I can even assign a Quick Key to it. Let's do that. I'll just use SY for this. So now in Spotlight Search I can type SY and I can press Return since it's the first item selected there and now I can type my input and then Return and it will execute that prompt. 

What's even better is you can type the Quick Keys, space, and then the word and you can see now pressing Return will automatically take what is after the space as the input. So I can get the results in even fewer steps. This is a really simple example. Just return some text from some text. But you could build shortcuts to take all sorts of actions and do all sorts of different things and then access them through Spotlight Actions. 

There also are a few other things that appear in the Actions Menu that are Context sensitive. One is you can get Menu items. So when I go to Actions here and I Search for something that happens to be in a Menu in the Menu Bar, like Bold, I actually will get it as a result and can activate that item from Spotlight. So it is handy to find menu items that might be deeply down in the submenu. Like let's look for Strikethrough, and you can see it comes up there, Return and it executes that menu item. So that could come in handy. 

Another thing you'll get, but it is kind of inconsistent, is if you search for the name of a window inside the app you're using, like in this case there is a window called Blank dot Pages, you'll see it as a result here you can use this to jump to that window. So it could be useful if you have a ton of windows open. 

So there's a look at using the new Spotlight Actions on your Mac.Take a look at what's available there to see what could be useful to you and consider creating some of your own Actions using shortcuts, as well. Thanks for watching.