The Spotlight Menu

See the little magnifying-glass icon () in your menu bar? That’s the mouse-driven way to open the Spotlight search box.

The other way is to press -space bar. If you can memorize only one keystroke on your Mac, that’s the one to learn. It works both at the desktop and in other programs.

In any case, the Spotlight text box appears just below your menu bar (Figure 4-1). Feel free to drag it around your screen.

As soon as you begin typing what you’re looking for, a list of results appears below the search box. This is a live, interactive search; that is, Spotlight modifies the menu of search results as you type.

Tip

You can make this results window taller—drag downward on its bottom edge—or move it around the screen (drag its top bar). Bonus tip: To restore the Spotlight window to its original size and position, hold the cursor down on the icon at the top of your screen.

Figure 4-1. Press -space bar, or click the magnifying-glass icon, to make the search box appear.

As you’d expect, Spotlight can round up anything with an icon on your Mac. Any file, folder, program, picture, movie, PDF document, music file, Microsoft Office document, and even font, regardless of its name or folder location. Spotlight can also find things according to their file types (type .doc to find Word files), download source (type cnet.com to find programs you downloaded from that site), sender (a name or email address), or Finder tag (Tip).

In the Spotlight search box, you can type part of its name or some text that appears inside the document you want. For example, if you’re trying to find a file called Pokémon Fantasy League.doc, typing just pok or leag would probably suffice. (The search box doesn’t find text in the middles of words, though; it searches from the beginnings of words.)

Spotlight also finds matching information within your Mac programs: every email message, Contacts entry, calendar appointment, web bookmark, System Preferences panel, To Do item, chat transcript, dictionary definition, and website in your History list. Spotlight can even find photos according to who is in them (using the Faces feature in Photos) or where they were taken (using its Places feature). If you use Messages (Chapter 20), Spotlight also finds the lucky members of your buddies lists.

You can also type out, in plain English, a description of files you’re trying to find. You can use any combination of file types (documents, movies, images, presentations, email), dates and times (2017, last year, this week, last month, in February), the names of email senders or recipients (simon jary, halle franklin), plus the words and phrases inside each file.

In other words, you can search for things like these: files I worked on last week, slides from 2016 containing EduMotion, images from last year, messages from Xerxes, photos of tia, files I created yesterday, emails from Bob last year that contain documents, or the presentation that I was working on yesterday.

Spotlight is also a Google wannabe. It can bring back results from the web for all kinds of common information, saving you the trouble of opening up your web browser and doing a search.

You’ll often find, for example, a Wikipedia entry in the results, or Twitter results, along with matches from the App Store, the iTunes music/movie/TV store, the Maps app’s database of restaurants and businesses, movies currently playing, and so on. Here are the kinds of things it knows about:

Yes, Spotlight is great for searching your Mac and the Internet. But it also has a third skill: It can do math for you.

Get into the habit of hitting -space when you have a quick question about any of the following:

Spotlight’s window is divided in half. The left side is the list of results.

On the right, though, is a preview pane that shows what’s in each result. When you click an item in the results list—or use the arrow keys to walk down that list—the preview pane bursts to life, presenting a visual display of that result (Figure 4-1).

Plenty of times, your quest for information ends with a glance at the preview pane. If you were hoping to find a dictionary definition, a phone number, an email address, a unit conversion, the address of a business from Maps, or the rating or plot summary of a current movie, for example, that information is now attractively arrayed before you. No need to open anything from here.

In the same way, you can grab yourself a Quick Look preview of what’s inside a document. That is, you can see the actual photo when you highlight a JPEG file’s name, or you can read the actual text when you highlight a Word document’s name.

If you’re using Spotlight to find and open an app or a document, double-click it to open it. Or use the arrow keys to walk down the menu, and then press Return to open the one you want.

If you click an application, it opens. If you select a System Preferences panel, System Preferences opens to that panel. If you choose an appointment, the Calendar program opens, already set to the appropriate day and time. Selecting an email message opens that message in Mail or Outlook. And so on.

Spotlight is so fast that it eliminates a lot of the folders-in-folders business that’s a side effect of modern computing. Why burrow around in folders when you can open any file or program with a couple of keystrokes?

It should be no surprise that a feature as important as Spotlight comes loaded with options, tips, and tricks. Here it is—the official, unexpurgated Spotlight Tip-O-Rama:

Most people just type the words they’re looking for into the Spotlight box. But if that’s all you type, you’re missing a lot of the power of this feature.

You can confine your search to certain categories using a simple code. For example, to find all photos, type kind:image. If you’re looking for a presentation document but you’re not sure whether you used Keynote, iWork, or PowerPoint to create it, type kind:presentation into the box. And so on.

Here’s the complete list of kinds. Remember to precede each keyword type with kind and a colon.

To find this:

Use one of these keywords:

A program

app, application, applications

Someone in your address book

contact, contacts

A folder or disk

folder, folders

A message in Mail

email, emails, mail message, mail messages

A Calendar appointment

event, events

A Calendar task

to do, to dos, todo, todos

A graphic

image, images

A movie

movie, movies

A music file

music

An audio file

audio

A PDF file

pdf, pdfs

A System Preferences control

preferences, system preferences

A Safari bookmark

bookmark, bookmarks

A font

font, fonts

A presentation (PowerPoint, iWork)

presentation, presentations

You can combine these codes with the text you’re seeking, too. For example, if you’re pretty sure you had a photo called “Naked Mole Rat,” you could cut directly to it by typing mole kind:images or kind:images mole (the order doesn’t matter).

Round up everything with a certain Finder tag (Tip) using “tag:” as the search prefix. For example, to find everything on your computer that you’ve tagged as Important, you’d search for tag:important.

If your brain is already on the verge of exploding, now might be a good time to take a break.

These days, you can limit Spotlight searches by any of the 175 different info-morsels that may be stored as part of the files on your Mac: author, audio bit rate, city, composer, camera model, pixel width, and so on. Note has a complete discussion of these so-called metadata types. (Metadata means “data about the data”—that is, descriptive info-bites about the files themselves.)

Here are a few examples:

Now, those examples are just a few representative searches out of the dozens that macOS makes available. To see the complete list of searchable metadata options, choose Other in the Spotlight Searching window, as described in Tip. You’ll probably be stunned and amused by the tweakiness of the things you can search for. (Altitude? Tempo? Year recorded? Due date?)