3.2. The Spotlight Window

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As you may have noticed, the Spotlight menu doesn't list every match on your hard drive. Unless you own one of those extremely rare 60-inch Apple Skyscraper Displays, there just isn't room.

Instead, Spotlight uses some fancy behind-the-scenes analysis to calculate and display the 20 most likely matches for what you typed. But at the top of the menu, you usually see that there are many other possible matches; it says something like "Show All (423)," meaning that there are 423 other candidates.

3.2.1. Spotlight Window from Spotlight Menu

If the Spotlight menuits Most Likely to Succeed listdoesn't include what you're looking for, click Show All (or just press Return or Enter). You've just opened the Spotlight window , shown in Figure 3-2.

Figure 3-2. You can open this window either by choosing Show All from the Spotlight menu or by pressing Option- - Space bar at any time. (You can change this keystroke, if you like; see Section 3.3.1.)


Now you have access to the complete list of matches, neatly organized by category. (Even this view starts out showing only the top five matches in each category. If there's more to see, click the link that says "145 more" beneath the list.)

3.2.2. Opening the Spotlight Window Directly

Choosing Show All from the Spotlight menu is one way to open the Spotlight window. But if you want to open the Spotlight window directly , using the Spotlight menu is a bit roundabout.

Instead, press the keystroke for opening the Spotlight window. It's Option- -Space bar, but you can change this keystroke to just about anything you like. (See Section 3.3.1.)

When the Spotlight window opens, you can start typing whatever you're looking for into the Search box at the upper right.

As you typeor, more realistically , a second or two after you type each letterthe window changes to reveal, item by item, a list of the files and folders whose names contain what you typed.


Tip: If you're not sure about the spelling of the word you're typing, type as much as you know, and then hit Option-Esc. Tiger obligingly drops down its list of Every Word It Knows That Begins With Those Letters in a huge, scrolling menu!If you've typed decon , for example, you see correctly spelled items for decongest, decongestant , and so on. You can click one to make it fill in the Search box.(By the way: -period does the same thing, but it works only in the Spotlight window. If you learn Option-Esc instead, you can use it in the Spotlight window, the Spotlight menu, TextEdit, Stickies, and other Cocoa text programs.)

While the searching is going on, a sprocket icon whirls away in the upper-left corner of the window. If a search is taking a long time, you're free to switch into another program while Spotlight keeps working in the background.

GEM IN THE ROUGH
All Roads Lead to Spotlight

As you know, you can open the Spotlight window using a keystroke or from the Spotlight menu after performing a search.

But those are only the beginning.

Try this: highlight a phrase in any program. Control-click (or right-click) the highlighted phrase, and then choose Search in Spotlight from the shortcut menu. (In some programs, like Word, the command just says Spotlight. In a few programs, alas, there's no Spotlight item at all.) Boom: the Spotlight window opens, already stocked with the search results that match your highlighted phrase.

But wait, there's more! If you're using a Cocoa program (one designed just for Mac OS X, like Mail, Safari, or TextEdit), you can also use the Services Spotlight submenu. (See Section 5.9.2 for more on Services.) That command even has a keyboard shortcut of its own: Shift- -F.

Remember, too, that Spotlight has its claws in all kinds of individual Mac OS X programs. You'll find a Spotlight search bar in System Preferences (so that you can pull up the correct panel), in Mail (to find a certain message), in Automator (to search for components for your software robots; see Section 8.1.1.1), and so on. As software companies get around to it, they're also welcome to incorporate pieces of the Spotlight technology into their own programs


To cancel the search in progress, click the X button next to the phrase you typed, or just tap the Esc key. That button clears the box so you can type a different word or phrase.

3.2.3. Expand or Collapse the List

Once you're looking at the search results, the Spotlight window may look clean and simple. But it's actually crawling with fun activities for the whole family.

For example, the flippy triangles next to each category (Documents, Images, and so on) are buttons . Clicking one hides or shows that category list. If you're looking for a photograph, you may as well collapse all the other headings to leave more room on your screen.


Tip: If you Option -click one of the flippy triangles, you collapse or expand all of the headings at once. That's very handy when you want to isolate a single category, like Images; Option-click to collapse all headings, and then open the one you really care about.It's an old trick, actually; it also works in Finder list views and iPhoto film-roll views.

You can perform another sort of expansion, too. If you see "40 more" at the bottom of a category list, click that phrase to expand the list so you're seeing all matching items in that category. To return to the original, Top Five Only view, click the words "Show top 5" in the blue category-header bar.

3.2.4. Sort the List

At the right side of the Spotlight window, you find a skinny command panel with headings like "Group by," "Sort Within Group by," "When," and "Where." These are your tickets to grouping, sorting, and filtering the list of found stuff. (Figure 3-3 shows the difference between grouping and sorting.) Your options are:

  • Kind . The first time you use Spotlight, the search results appear grouped by Kind, as shown in Figure 3-2that is, grouped by Applications, Documents, Images, and so on.

  • Name . In other words, an alphabetical list. (This option is available only for sorting, not grouping.)

  • Date . Click "Date" to sort or group the list chronologically by the date you last opened it . (That's not necessarily the same thing as the date you created or modified it. It's actually more useful, because you don't always change a document when you open it.)

    This option is kind of neat when you use it for grouping. The list sprouts blue headings called Today, Yesterday, Previous 7 Days, Previous 30 Days, and Earlier, giving you a beautiful chronological view of your computer world.

  • People . This option sorts or groups the results associated with a particular person. You'd be surprised at how many documents have a person's name embedded in them. Microsoft Office documents, for example, embed their creators ' names into the file. PDF documents and saved Web pages may also have authors' or publishers' names embedded. And Spotlight tracks email messages and their attachments according to who sent them.

    Everything else shows up under a heading (or sorted into an order) called No Authors.

  • Flat List . This option, for grouping only, just means, "Don't group at all." No blue headings appear to separate the search results by kind, date, or people.

Figure 3-3. You can sort the master list by group, which is indicated by blue horizontal dividers . Then within each group, you can sort by another criterion. Here, for example, are some search results grouped by date and sorted by kind (top) and the same results grouped by person but sorted by name (bottom).


3.2.5. See the Pretty Pictures

When you've grouped your results by Kind, the blue divider bars for Images and PDF Documents offer some useful little buttons at the right side. Figure 3-4 shows what they do.

3.2.6. Get More Info

Click the button that appears to the right of anything in the list to expand its listingor, if you're a speed freak, select the item and then press the right-arrow key, just as though it's a folder in a Finder list view. A sort of Get Info panel drops down, identifying where the item is on your hard drive (using path notation; see Section 16.2) and listing its authors, size , creation and modification dates, "last opened" date, dimensions (for graphics and PDF documents), duration (for music and movies), sender (for mail messages), date (for iCal appointments), and so on.

Figure 3-4. You can view groups of PDF documents either in a list, just like other documents, or as thumbnails, as shown here. Photos and other graphics files offer even more fun; you can view them as a list, as thumbnails, or as a full-screen slideshow.


Table 3-2.

For this kind of file:

You may see these details:

Applications

where (on the hard drive), version number

Bookmarks

URL (full Web address)

Contacts

telephone number, email address (which you can click to open an outgoing message)

Documents

where, size

Folders

where, number of icons inside

Email

date received, from, to

Events/To Dos

title, calendar, start date

Images

thumbnail, where, dimensions, camera maker and model, color space, profile, focal length, alpha channel, red eye, exposure, size,

PDF documents

page 1 preview, where, title, authors, version, page count, dimensions, security, creator, encoding software

Music

album art, playback controls, where, album, title, genre , authors/ artists , year recorded, channel, codec, duration, size

Movies

playback controls, dimensions, codec, channel, duration, size

Fonts

where, version, size

Presentations

where, size



Note: If an email message that you sent comes up in the results, Spotlight displays its "date received." Of course, what it means is "date sent."

3.2.7. Filter the List

Filtering , in this case, means winnowing down hiding some of the results so that you see only the good stuff. That's the purpose of the "When" and "Where" controls on the right side of the screen.

  • When . If you click the Today link, for example, Spotlight cuts down the list so that you see only items you've opened today. Click This Week to see only items you've opened this week, and so on. (Click Any Date to restore the full list.)

  • Where . These links let you restrict the listing to what's on your Home folder (click Home) or on your main, internal hard drive (click Macintosh HD or whatever your drive is called). Click Computer to restore the full list of everything on all your drives .

3.2.8. Work With It

Most of the time, what people do with the results of a Spotlight search is open them. You find something, you open it.

But there are other things you can do with your search results. If you Control-click something in the list (or a highlighted group of somethings), you get a very useful little shortcut menu that may offer options like these:

  • Get Info . Opens the standard Get Info dialog box, the same one you'd see if you chose File Get Info in the Finder.

  • Reveal in Finder . This Spotlight-window stuff is pretty coolbut it's not the familiar Finder where you're used to working with files. This command jumps to, and highlights, the selected item in the Finder, nestled in whatever window contains it. Now you can rename it, duplicate it, make an alias of it, do whatever you gotta do.

  • Slideshow . This command (available for graphics files only) triggers the full-screen slideshow described on Section 14.10.

  • Mail . You guessed it: Choose this one to fire up the Mail program. You'll find the selected file or files already attached to a new outgoing message, ready to address and send.


    Tip: Everything in the Spotlight window is a regular Finder icon! You can work with anything almost exactly as though you're looking at one big list view: Drag something to the Trash, drag something to the desktop to move it there, drag something onto a Dock icon to open it with a certain program, Option- -drag it to the desktop to create an alias, and so on.
  • Create Workflow . This command fires up Automator (see Chapter 8), where you see the selected item has already been installed as a "Get Specified Finder Items" action, all ready to build into a workflow. (All of this terminology will make much more sense once you've read Chapter 8.)

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Mac OS X. The Missing Manual
Mac OS X Snow Leopard: The Missing Manual (Missing Manuals)
ISBN: 0596153287
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2005
Pages: 506
Authors: David Pogue

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