3.1. The Spotlight Menu

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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 at the desktop, but also when you're working in another program.


Tip: You can designate one of your F-keys (top row of the keyboard) to open Spotlight, if you prefer. Choose System Preferences, click Spotlight, and use the "Spotlight menu keyboard shortcut pop-up menu.

In any case, the Spotlight text box appears just below your menu bar.

Begin typing to identify what you want to find and open. For example, if you're trying to find a file called "Pokmon Fantasy League.doc," typing just pok or leag would probably work.

As you type, a menu begins to grow downward from the search box, listing everything Spotlight can find containing what you've typed so far. (This is a live, interactive search; that is, Spotlight modifies the menu of search results as you type .) The menu lists every file, folder, program, email message, address book entry, calendar appointment, picture, movie, PDF document, music file, Web bookmark, Microsoft Office document (from recent versions of Word, PowerPoint, and Excel), System Preferences panel, and even font that contains what you typed, regardless of its name or folder location.


Note: Spotlight isn't just searching the names of your files and folders. It's actually searching their contents the words inside your documents, for example. Technically speaking, Spotlight searches all your files' metadata , which Apple calls data about data: descriptive text information about what's in a file, like its height, width, size , creator, copyright holder, title, editor, created date, and last modification date.

If you see the icon you were hoping to dig up, click it to open it. Or use the arrow keys to "walk down" the menu, and then press Return or Enter to open it.

Figure 3-1. Top: Press -Space, or click the magnifying-glass icon, to make the search bar appear.
Bottom: As you type, Spotlight builds the list of every match it can find, neatly organized by type: programs, documents, folders, images, PDF documents, and so on. In System Preferences, you can redefine the keystroke, which folders are "peeked into," and which categories appear here (and in which order).
You don't have to type an entire word. Typing kumq will find documents containing the word kumquat.
However, it's worth noting that Spotlight recognizes only the beginnings of words. Typing umquat won't find a document containingor even namedKumquat.


If you choose an application, well, that program pops onto the screen. If you choose a System Preferences panel, System Preferences opens and presents that panel. If you choose an appointment, the iCal program opens, already set to the appropriate day and time. Selecting an email message opens that message in Mail. And so on.

As you'll soon learn, Spotlight isn't just a fast Find command. It's an enhancement that's so deep, convenient and powerful, it threatens to make all that folders-in-folders business nearly pointless. Why burrow around in folders when you can open any file or program with a couple of keystrokes?

3.1.1. Spotlight Menu Tips

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

  • If the very first itemlabeled Top Hitis the icon you were looking for, you can press -Enter or -Return to open it. This is a big deal, because it means that in most cases, you can perform the entire operation without ever taking your hands off the keyboard.


    Note: What, exactly, is the Top Hit? Mac OS X chooses it based on its relevance (the importance of your search term inside that item) and timeliness (when you last opened it) to determine which of these items is most likely the one that you're looking for.

    To open Safari, for example, you can press -Space (to open the Spotlight bar), type safa , and assuming Safari is the top hitpress -Enter, all in rapid-fire sequence. Presto: Safari is before you.


    Tip: How cool is this? To jump to a search result's Finder icon instead of opening it, -click its name.
    FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTION
    Why Spotlight is Not Google Desktop

    My buddies don't understand what the big deal about Spotlight is. "Heck, we had that in Windows for almost a year before Tiger even came out," they say. "It's called Google Desktop." What am I supposed to tell them ?

    Tell them Spotlight isn't even in the same league.

    Google Desktop Search can indeed search even inside the words of your documents, including Microsoft Office documents, email messages (certain email programs only), and chat transcripts (AOL Instant Messenger only).

    But it's not integrated into the operating system the way Spotlight is. That makes a huge difference in a number of ways. For one thing, Google Desktop shows the results in a Web browser windowa separate program that must be launched before you get your answers. It's not built right into the system.

    It's not available from within any program, either. You can't open it with a keystroke. It doesn't search your address book or calendar. It's not nearly as secure and private.

    And above all, Google Desktop updates its internal database of what's on your hard drives at regular intervals, but it's not real-time. Spotlight, on the other hand, properly catalogs your system every time you create, save, move, copy, or delete a file.


    The only wrinkle here is that the Spotlight menu may still be building itself. If you go too quickly, you may be surprised as another entry jumps into the top slot just as you're about to hit -Enterand you wind up opening the wrong thing. Over time, you develop a feel for when the Top Hit is reliably the one you want.

  • Spotlight's menu shows you only 20 of the most likely suspects , evenly divided among the categories (Documents, Applications, and so on). The downside: To see the complete list, you have to open the Spotlight window (Section 3.2).

  • The upside: It's fairly easy to open something in this menu from the keyboard. Just press -down arrow (or -up arrow) to jump from category to category. Once you've highlighted the first result in a category, you can "walk" through the remaining four by pressing the arrow key by itself. Then, once you've highlighted what you want, press Return or Enter to open it.

    In other words, you can get to anything in the Spotlight menu with only a few keystrokes.

  • The Esc key (top left corner of your keyboard) offers a two-stage "back out of this" method. Tap it once to close the Spotlight menu and erase what you've typed, so that you're all ready to type in something different. Tap Esc a second time to close the Spotlight text box entirely, having given up on the whole idea of searching.

    (If you just want to cancel the whole thing in one step, press -Space again, or -period, or -Esc.)

  • Think of Spotlight as an application launcher. If some program on your hard drive doesn't have a Dock icon, for example, Spotlight offers a quick way to open it without having to take your hands off the keyboard.

  • Think of Spotlight as your little black book. When you need to look up a number in Address Book, don't bother opening Address Book (or even using the Dashboard equivalent); it's faster to use Spotlight. You can type somebody's name or even part of someone's phone number.

  • Among a million other things, Spotlight tracks the keywords you've applied to your pictures in iPhoto. As a result, you can find, open, or insert any iPhoto photo at any time, no matter what program you're using, just by using the Spotlight box at the top of every Open File dialog box (Section 5.7.7)! This is a great way to insert a photo into an outgoing email message, a presentation, or a Web page you're designing. iPhoto doesn't even have to be running.

  • If you type in more than one word, Spotlight works just the way Google does. That is, it finds things that contain both words somewhere inside.

    If you're searching for a phrase where the words really belong together, put quotes around them. For example, searching for military intelligence will round up documents that contain those two words, but not necessarily side-by-side. Searching for "military intelligence" finds documents that contain that exact phrase. (Insert your own political joke here.)

  • Spotlight is also a quick way to adjust one of your Mac's preference settings. Instead of opening up the System Preferences program, type the first few letters of, say, volume or network or clock into Spotlight. The Spotlight menu lists the appropriate System Preferences panel, so that you can jump directly to it.

  • 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, AppleWorks, 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 .

    Table 3-1.

    To find this:

    Use one of these keywords:

    A program

    app, application, applications

    Someone in your address book

    contact, contacts

    A folder

    folder, folders

    A message in Mail

    email, emails, mail message, mail messages

    An iCal appointment

    event, events

    An iCal task

    to do, to dos, todo, todos

    A graphic

    image, images

    A movie

    movie, movies

    A music file

    music

    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, etc.)

    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.)

  • You can use a similar code to restrict the search by chronology. If you type date: yesterday , Spotlight limits its hunt to items that you last opened yesterday.

    Here's the complete list of date keywords you can use: this week, this month, this year; today, yesterday, tomorrow; next week, next month, next year . (The last four items are useful only for finding upcoming iCal appointments. Even Spotlight can't show you files you haven't created yet.)

    Here again, you can string words together. To find all PDFs you opened today, use date:today kind:PDF . And if it's a PDF containing the word wombat you're seeking, you can type date:today kind:pdf wombat , although at this point, you're not saving all that much time.

  • If you point to an item in the Spotlight menu without clicking, a little tooltip box appears. It tells you the item's actual namewhich is useful if Spotlight listed something because of text that appears inside the file, not its nameand its folder path (that is, where it is on your hard drive).

  • The Spotlight menu lists 20 found items, maxthe most likely suspects. In the following pages, you'll learn about how to see the rest of the stuff. But for now, note that you can eliminate some of the categories that show up here (like PDF Documents or Bookmarks), and even rearrange them, to permit more of the other kinds of things to enjoy those 20 seats of honor . Details on Section 3.3.1.

  • Spotlight shows you only the matches from your account and the public areas of the Mac (like the System, Application, and Developer folders)but not what's in anyone else's Home folder. If you were hoping to search your spouse's email for phrases like "meet you at midnight," forget it.

  • Spotlight works by storing an index , a private, multi-megabyte Dewey Decimal system, on each hard drive, disk partition, or USB flash (memory) drive. If you have some oddball type of disk, like a hard drive that's been formatted for Windows, Spotlight doesn't ordinarily index itbut you can turn on indexing by using the File Get Info command on that drives icon and turning indexing on manually.

    UP TO SPEED
    What Spotlight Knows

    The beauty of Spotlight is that it doesn't just find files whose names match what you've typed. That would be so 2004!

    No, Spotlight actually looks inside the files. It can actually read and search the contents of text files, RTF and PDF documents, and documents from AppleWorks, Keynote, Pages, Photoshop, and Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, and PowerPoint).

    As time goes on, software companies will release bits of add-on softwareplug-insthat make their documents searchable by Spotlight too. Check in periodically at, for example, www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/spotlight, to look for Spotlight plug-ins relevant to the kind of work you do. Within a week of Tiger's release, for example, you could download free Spotlight plug-ins for OmniGraffle, OmniOutliner, TypeIt4Me, MacDraft, REALBasic, Painter, Wolfram Notebook, and others.

    But that's only the beginning. Spotlight searches files not only for the text inside them, but also over 115 other bits of texta staggering collection of information tidbits including the names of the layers in a Photoshop document, the tempo of an MP3 file, the shutter speed of a digital-camera photo, a movie's copyright holder, a document's page size, and on and on.

    Technically, this sort of secondary information is called metadata. It's usually invisible, although a lot of it shows up in the Get Info dialog box described in Chapter 2.

    You might think that typing something into the Spotlight bar triggers a search. But to be technically correct, Spotlight has already done its searching. In the first 15 to 30 minutes after you install Tigeror in the minutes after you attach a new hard driveSpotlight invisibly collects information about everything on your hard drive. Like a kid cramming for an exam, it reads, takes notes on, and memorizes the contents of all of your files. (During this time, the Spotlight icon in the menu bar pulses ; if you click it, you'll be told that Spotlight is indexing the drives.) Once it has indexed your hard drive in this way, Spotlight can produce search results in seconds.

    After that initial indexing process, Spotlight continues to monitor what's on your hard drive, indexing new and changed files in the background, in the microseconds between your keystrokes and clicks in other programs.


  • You can also use Spotlight from Mac OS X's Unix command linecalled Terminalas described on Section 3.4.3.8.

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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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