Do You Use It? Spotlight on the Mac

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82

First, thanks for doing these “Do You Use It?” series - pretty informative

About the only thing I use Spotlight for is launching apps. It’s ability to return useful results for documents and folders is, wellll, lacking (I miss earlier versions ability to display items’ path).

I use a variety of methods for launching apps: (1) Spotlight, (2) Dock, (3) a couple of ‘docked’ folders with app aliases in a couple of categories (e.g., System Admin tools, “AV Tools” (Audio, Video, Photo editing tools)), (4) Launchpad… on rare occasion

I also have several other ‘docked’ folders containing (1) frequently used documents, (2) a couple containing links to often used folders; some of those folders contain aliases to folders containing aliases to multiple folders and documents I often use together as tabbed folder sets (e.g., select all, then either CMD-Option-O or CMD-Control-O)

As for finding files and folders, again, I use a variety of apps depending on what’s most suitable for my search: (1) DEVONsphere Express, (2) Easy Find (DEVONTechnologies), (3) Find Any File, and, if I’m searching within a Finder folder, I usually use Finder’s search (which may actually be a spotlight search)

Gotta say, Easy Find and Find Any File saved my bacon when thousands of file names on my Synology NAS were munged following a DSM update because they contained characters not supported (not sure why they remained unchanged before the update - Synology tech support never fessed up)… things like pikes “|”, spaces at the end of file names (viz., Space-period-extension), “?”’s and others too numerous to mention

83

What happens if you click the magnifying glass icon to the right of the menu? The Spotlight search shortcut can be taken over by other things, so perhaps that explains it.

84

Daily is more frequent than Frequently, which is why they’re in that order. :-) I didn’t want to get into the difference between once a day and many times a day—it’s not terribly relevant—but other time-related options like weekly and monthly felt weird because most people wouldn’t remember invoking Spotlight that carefully.

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85

Find files works much much better for me. Every time I’ve tried to use Spotlight, it returns not the result I was looking for. Find files will show me all of the instances of the file name I’m looking for and by using Enclosing Folder may show some related files I’ve forgotten that I need to deal with, too. Spotlight just does not work for me. Surely if I spent many hours learning to use Spotlight, I could learn to use it but Find does what I need to do and I can rely on the results it returns. For me, Find is reliable, Spotlight is unreliable.

Do You Use It? Launchpad on the Mac
86

I use Houdaspot never Spotlight

87

A question concerning search for files and folders: When I select a spotlight search result , pressing and holding command shows the path to the enclosing folder. Hitting command return is supposed to to take me to that enclosing folder. Instead, it always takes me to the root directory?
Does anyone else encounter this issue, too?

88

I also use Alfred.

89

I always do Command-R and it reveals the item in a Finder window.

90

Just use it to find files. Why isn’t that an option in your list? 8-)

91

Weirdly enough, I didn’t find Spotlight on Mac very useful until I started using it to quickly find apps on my iPad. I usually have an attached keyboard on my iPad, so soon figured out that invoking Spotlight and typing the first few letters of an app’s name was a much faster way for me to launch something. Only then did I remember that Spotlight was, and had been for a long time, on the Mac. Eventually I plan to explore more things I can do with Spotlight, but as I’ve been saying that on and off since 2005, it’s likely not going to happen any time soon.

92

I voted frequently because I use it at least once a day mainly as an app launcher or calculations.
I changed the default CMD+Space for CTRL+Space to avoid clashing with Adobe Applications, but I found that it is also the shortcut to change keyboards, so I disabled that option because I rarely change keyboards.

93

I find Spotlight confusing though I do use it. It has limitation which guide my selection of which apps I use. For example, Notes App content is not searched in Spotlight so I do not use Notes. When I really need to find something I turn to HoudahSpot since I like to interface which helps guide my search.

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That’s what Documents means, since that’s the heading Spotlight shows.

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Hitting cmd-return reveals the parent folder in Finder. This always works for me. Same result as cmd-r.

I resent the way Apple has changed the Spotlight UI when it comes to the path display though. When I press cmd, I want to see the full path without any shenanigans (as others have also pointed out). In fact, ideally, I’d want an option to show the path as soon as an item is selected without even having to hit a modifier.

96

I think Spotlight really needs to be properly configured to become useful.

If your most obvious searches render a big mess, it’s most likely because you have activated a bunch of Spotlight search categories that you’re not really interested in. And of course Apple’s defaults are all on. Personally, I turn off a lot of these categories because I know I’ll likely never use Spotlight to search for that type of item. Most importantly, I turn off “Siri Suggestions”.

Settings > Siri & Spotlight > Search results

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97

I actually use Spotlight’s equivalent a lot on iPhone too. I often find it faster to just swipe down and enter a few characters rather than go browse through other springboard pages or dig down into folders to get an app I rarely use. There’s the app library too, but swiping down for me is faster than getting to the last springboard page just to reveal app library. Swiping down also seems easier than hitting that little search target at the bottom of the iOS 16 springboard (but the latter is certainly less obscure than swiping down).

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98

My first impression (which I mostly still have) is that Spotlight is trying to provide enough capability to be used in place of the Finder, Dock and other launcher-type applications.

The hearkens back to Jef Raskin’s book, The Humane Interface. Without going into all the ugly details, one of his core design principles is that if your computer system has sufficiently-robust search capabilities, then it no longer matters where documents are stored. The system can put content wherever makes sense with respect to the OS’s internals and users can access content (to view, print, edit, whatever) simply by searching for it by content. Things like directories and filenames shouldn’t be necessary, and on a system with sufficiently-robust search, can actually be eliminated (except, maybe, for internal use by system software).

In practice, I think this works better on a small system than on a modern computer with hundreds of gigabytes of content, especially when you have many revisions of similar documents. But I think Spotlight was intended (at least by some of its developers) as the core search component of such an OS.

The fact that it deliberately blurs the line between apps, documents and on-line content also fits in with Raskin’s concept of a “modeless” system - where users don’t know and don’t care where content is, as long as it can quickly be found when it is needed.

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99

I wonder if there is any functional difference at all between cmd-r and cmd-enter for a selected Spotlight search.

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I rarely use Spotlight directly, but I do use HoudahSpot for searches and it uses the Spotlight index.
For App launching I use QuickSilver and Dockshelf.

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No, I only use Alfred for launching apps. I find I can do a lot of advanced searches in the Finder so I go directly to the search there instead.