Finder, Spotlight, and Alt-Tab Rant Warning

[mkrishnan]

Okay, I'm writing this rant in hopes that I'm missing something obvious...as far as I know, this behavior is identical on both of my Macs (both running 10.4.8 at the mo, but as far as I know, this has always been true on Tiger).

Why does the Spotlight Show All window not "belong" to Finder or to any other application? You can see it by invoking show all windows from Exposé, but suppose you are in the situation where you spotlight several PDFs and you open them, one at a time, in Preview, to see which one you want. You must Exposé back and forth to get back to the spotlight window, because it doesn't belong to Finder, and so if you Alt-Tab back to finder, it remains in the background, behind the Preview windows. What is the thinking behind this? Why would a Window be spiritually homeless, bereft of any association to any running program (as Spotlight itself doesn't appear in Alt-Tab to take ownership of the window)?

I was reviewing a manuscript earlier today and trying to go back and forth to pull out references that should be added, between Spotlight, Preview, Firefox, and TextEdit, and this was driving me crazy!

I haven't heard any of my other emo friends bitching about this while they sit around with their razor blades... but I can't be the first one to notice this, can I?

 

[smueboy]

Good point - i've noticed this before when doing a similar thing. It never bothered me too much since i keep the Spotlight window open on the extreme right side of my screen and in all other program windows i leave an inch on the right side open so that i can click on the desktop/Spotlight from any program.
That said, it is stupid to not have Spotlight selectable as either it's own application or to come up when you select finder. Maybe they'll fix this in Leopard?

 

[hayduke]

My thoughts...

1) It is a window so it should be visible by Exposé.
2) It is not exactly an application and it has its own system key to bring it forward, so not being invokable by comman+tab etc isn't too surprising.
3) Why don't you just bring Spotlight forward with it's own hot keys?

I understand the problem (I think...), but it just seems like you can avoid it by using the Spotlight hot heys. Right?

 

[mkrishnan]

I understand the problem (I think...), but it just seems like you can avoid it by using the Spotlight hot heys. Right?

Mmm, this actually helps a lot. I didn't realize that the spotlight window command (alt-opt-spacebar for me, at least) brought up the existing window rather than making a new one.

Thank you!

It does still seem to me that it should either have a separate icon in the Alt-Tab bezel or be associated with Finder, though.... The problem is that it's jarring -- I am alt-tabbing between the rest of the apps I'm using in that particular scenario, but I must do something different for Spotlight. And once that gets going, I have maybe 10 different PDFs open in Preview, and Exposé becomes a nuisance....