Whether you’re new to the Mac or just can’t figure out where a specific preference option is buried, you’ll love the convenience of the built-in search function in OS X System Preferences. This is an often overlooked feature that can prevent a lot of frustration when looking for some less-than-obvious settings panels, and it’s very … Read More
The iOS Spotlight Search feature defaults to showing Contacts from a devices address book as the top search results, which may be helpful, but that same feature already exists when searching through Contacts anyway. What if you want to show matching apps first instead? Or maybe you want to list emails or messages as the … Read More
Searching the file system for a specific document or file is easy and very fast. Though most users are best served using Spotlight from the menubar, there are times when either Spotlight isn’t working, you need more paramaters, you’re working in the Terminal, operating with a remote machine, or perhaps just would like to use … Read More
For those of us who have a bunch of apps contained within iOS folders, it’s fairly easy to misplace apps that aren’t used often. To quickly find out what folder contains an app, just swipe to the right of the iOS home screen to bring up Spotlight search, then type the name of the app … Read More
Though you can add anything to Spotlights Privacy list to prevent indexing of that folder or file, the obvious problem with that approach is the file or folder is shown within the Spotlight control panel in Mac OS X, making it easy for someone else to find the excluded items. Another way to hide a … Read More
While you can immediately access a dictionary definition by three-finger tapping on a single word in Mac OS X or double-tapping in iOS, the Mac also provides another instant dictionary option: Spotlight.
Modern versions of Mac OS X allow videos and movie files to be previewed and played directly in the Spotlight search results menu. This works with any supported movie or video file type that can be played in QuickTime. To try this out for yourself:
You can drag and drop files directly from Spotlight to elsewhere in the Mac OS X Finder. This allows Spotlight search to function as a sort of basic file manager, not quite like the Finder, but at least for quickly locating and moving a document of any type on the Mac to another location, or … Read More
Spotlight is the powerful built-in search engine on Mac. Not only will it find just about any file or folder buried on your file system or attached drives, but it also doubles as a fantastically quick application launcher, dictionary lookup tool, and so much more. If you aren’t using Spotlight on a regular basis yet … Read More
Spotlight is generally very good at keeping a valid index of a drives contents up to date, but if you’ve recently restored a drive or had to delete the Spotlight index for one reason or another, you may need to reindex the drive manually. This is easy from the Spotlight control panel, and can also … Read More
The default behavior for Spotlight is to start indexing any drive as soon as it’s connected to a Mac, a task that can take a very long time with larger volumes. The problem is that for larger external backup drives and Time Machine volumes, you don’t necessarily want it indexed by Spotlight. This is particularly … Read More
Do you need to rebuild the entire Spotlight index on a Mac? It’s easy to do, but can take a while. This tutorial will show you how to start the reindexing process of an entire drive in Mac OS X, we’ll do this using the Spotlight control panel, and we’ll cover an alternative method as … Read More
Spotlight is a wonderful feature of Mac OS X that lets you quickly find literally anything on a Mac by search, that includes files, apps, folders, emails, you name it, and Spotlight will find it, but sometimes you don’t want everything to be indexed. Whether that’s an external backup drive, a scratch disk, a directory … Read More
Whether you are disabling Spotlight or just wanting to reduce menubar icon clutter, it’s possible to hide the Spotlight icon. Here’s the best part though; if you just want to hide the Spotlight menu, you can do so without disabling the search abilities from functioning in the Finder or with other apps that rely on … Read More
Completely disabling and reenabling Spotlight in Mac OS X Lion, OS X Mountain Lion, and OS X Mavericks can be done with the help of the Terminal. The following command unloads the Spotlight mds agent from launchd, thereby preventing the daemon from running or indexing any drives entirely. Open up the Terminal (found in /Applications/Utilities/) … Read More
There’s a lot of hooplah in the web world about Google Instant and it’s ability to turn up search results immediately while you type them. Is Google Instant really as new and revolutionary as it’s claimed to be? Yes and no. Yes for the web, and no for computing. You know what other prominent search … Read More
If your Mac is suddenly running sluggish and you launched Activity Monitor, you may notice a process named ‘mds’ cranking away at 30% and even up to 90% CPU utilization. If you see this, don’t worry, it’s not abnormal behavior and your Mac isn’t crashing, it’s just indexing it’s built in search engine. What is … Read More
You can easily turn OS X’s wonderful Spotlight search engine into only an application launcher for Mac apps by adjusting the Spotlight search settings that are found within System Preferences.
