Dictionary suggestion > system preferences?

[xizar]

Does anyone else have the artifact whereby typing "startup disk" in Spotlight immediately finds a definition in the dictionary application while not finding the system preferences option only after 10-15 seconds?

I'm further frustrated that it doesn't learn that I don't care about the dictionary definition and have only clicked on the system preference tool since getting this computer.

Other than telling Spotlight not to look in the dictionary, is there some way I can reverse it so that applications take precedence in searching over definitions?

 

[r0k]

There was once a farmer who was miserable and depressed. He went to the doctor and said "I am miserable and depressed." The doctor told him to go home and bring all his farm animals into his bedroom and come back in a week.

The farmer did this and came back even more distraught. "Now I'm going insane! And the smell!"

"Now go home and put the animals back outside in the barn and come back in one week!" the doctor told him.

The following week the man came back a changed man. "I can sleep through the night and there's no smell! You've cured me!" he told the doctor.



Now I'm going to give you the same advice. Stop using Spotlight to find things and boot windows under bootcamp and use the friggin' start button to find everything and come back and see me in one week...

 

[xizar]

If I understand you correctly, you said:

I am going to be an ass and ridicule you for using Windows rather than simply state that I don't know if there is a way to change that.

I'd thank you for your time, but clearly you got more out of it than I did, so I shall respond with "you're welcome for the opportunity to make a joke at my expense."

 

[r0k]

If I understand you correctly, you said:


I'd thank you for your time, but clearly you got more out of it than I did, so I shall respond with "you're welcome for the opportunity to make a joke at my expense."

Sorry, I couldn't resist. And it wasn't at your expense. It was intended to be at the expense of the Eye of Sauron up in Redmond, Washington. Though perhaps there was a slight dig at your patience when to me it seems like the slowest thing Spotlight does is faster than the fastest thing Windows does. I find Spotlight to be my favorite aspect of OS X and I was stuck in front of my clueless windows box at work so I couldn't research a more useful answer for you at the time.

There is an app called Quicksilver that was used on OS X for a time before Leopard brought Spotlight improvements. Perhaps you might give QS a try. I seem to remember you could assign cmd-space to QS instead of spotlight and you could have it search everything you wanted from email to files to applications and of course you could omit anything you wanted to omit. I used QS on my old G4 based Mac Mini but I don't use it any more. Perhaps you could set QS to search dictionary and all the rest and set Spotlight to only search apps. When I use Spotlight, I never notice dictionary entries only apps and files. Another tactic would be to drag applications to the top of the list and while they might not get refreshed first, they would be listed first.

 

[Gregg2]

Other than telling Spotlight not to look in the dictionary, is there some way I can reverse it so that applications take precedence in searching over definitions?

Precedence? Maybe not, but order, certainly.

System Preferences > Spotlight

The instructions are there for reordering and searching or not searching.