Spotlight search is possibly one of the best features on macOS. Operating systems all have a search feature but Spotlight is system search done perfectly. That said, it can break. It doesn’t happen often but sometimes, indexing problems may cause Spotlight search to stop working. This isn’t something a simple restart will fix. To learn about permissions, choose Help from the Finder menu bar, then search for “permissions.” From the same list of locations, select the folder or disk that you just added. Then click the Remove (–) button to remove it from the list. Quit System Preferences. Spotlight will reindex the contents of the folder or disk.
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There are a number of features of macOS that we Mac users often take for granted, forgetting that new users enter the Mac fold every day. This how to is for new Mac users who may have never used the handy Spotlight search function that is built into macOS.
Using Spotlight Search on Your Mac
Spotlight can be used to search for just about anything on your Mac, such as apps, documents, images and other file types. It will also offer up search results for things like Wikipedia articles, Maps, iTunes, movies, and much more.
Spotlight Search Mac Terminal
To open Spotlight, click the magnifying glass icon in the upper-right corner of the menu bar, or just press Command-Space from any app.
The Spotlight search field will open up on your Mac’s Desktop as shown below:
To begin a search, start typing words related to the search, such as an app name, document name, a word contained in a document, or a tag you’ve attached to a file. As mentioned above, you can also search for Wikipedia articles, movie titles, and even Map locations.
As you enter your search term, Spotlight will offer up autocomplete suggestions for the search. If you want to open the suggested item, simply hit the Return key, and the item will open.
You can also use your keyboard’s up and down cursor keys to highlight and review the results in the Spotlight window. When you do, you’ll see a preview of the result. This allows you to see if the highlighted item is the item you’re searching for. Double-click the item, or just press Return to open the item directly from the Spotlight search window.
For more tips and tricks that can help you make better use of your Mac, iOS device, Apple Watch, or Apple TV, be sure to visit the “How To” section of our website.
Tiger introduces Spotlight, Apple’s new desktop search technology that you can use to find anything on your computer as quickly as you can type. (Yep, that includes all the documents, Address Book contacts, Mail messages, folders, and drives that your Mac can access.) Remember, this search system is only for your Mac. You can’t search stuff on your brother’s Atari 800 in Dry Prong, Louisiana. (Not even the folks at Apple are that good.) But if the information is on your Mac’s hard drive, or a CD, or on your network, consider it located.
Figure 1 illustrates the Spotlight search field, which is always available from the Finder menu bar. Click the magnifying glass icon once, and the Spotlight search box appears.
Spotlight Search Mac Shortcut
Figure 1: A single Spotlight search box. Gregor the overlander pdf download.
To run a search, simply click in the Spotlight box and begin typing. Matching items appear as soon as you type, as shown in Figure 2, and the search results are continually refined while you type the rest of your search criteria. Like the Search box in earlier Finder window toolbars, you don’t need to press Return to begin the search.
![]() Spotlight Search Macbook Air
Figure 2: The search results start to appear immediately.
The results of your Spotlight search are presented in the Spotlight menu, which is automatically updated in real time as you continue to type. The top 20 most-relevant items are grouped into categories right on the Spotlight menu, including Messages, Documents, Folders, Images, Contacts, and so on. Spotlight takes a guess at the item that’s most likely the match you’re looking for and presents it in the special Top Hit category that always appears first.
To open the Top Hit item like a true Tiger power user, just press Command+Return.
Literally any text string is acceptable as a Spotlight search. However, here’s a short list of common search criteria:
Spotlight Search Mac Shortcut
To reset the Spotlight search and try another text string, click the X icon that appears at the right side of the Spotlight box. (Of course, you can also backspace to the beginning of the field, but that’s a little less elegant.)
After you find the item that you’re looking for, you can click it once to
Here is another favorite timesaver: You can display all the files of a particular type on your system by using the file type as the keyword. For example, to provide a list of all images on your system, just use images as your keyword — the same goes for movies and audio, too.
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