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really lovin' that spotlight!

I use Spotlight a lot, mostly to get to system prefs. Sometimes I forget exactly what the catagory that I am looking for is called, so I type something close and descriptive and it pops up.

Searching through photos is a lot easier too. I imported mine using Automator and gave them very descriptive names and now if I want a picture of the kids in Korea at Sokcho Beach, I get it in an instant.
 
njmac said:
I wish spotlight came with a feature that would give you results in google-like fashion for words spelled wrong or vague.

This is how it would work: type in your word, and spotlight opens as usual with results (or no results) then in a tab at the top of the window you could click on it to find a window open saying did you mean to search for____ and give you results.
Click to expand...

Spotlight has a relatively secret feature that, while not quite the same thing as Google's spell-check/suggestion feature, is of similar usefulness.

If you type just the first few letters of a word into Spotlight's search box then press option-escape, a drop-down list will appear of correctly spelled words (courtesy of OS X's built-in dictionary) that begin with the letters you just typed. Select the word from the list and spotlight will use that for your search.
 

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VanNess said:
Spotlight has a relatively secret feature that, while not quite the same thing as Google's spell-check/suggestion feature, is of similar usefulness.

If you type just the first few letters of a word into Spotlight's search box then press option-escape, a drop-down list will appear of correctly spelled words (courtesy of OS X's built-in dictionary) that begin with the letters you just typed. Select the word from the list and spotlight will use that for your search.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the Spotlight tip! That's one that I haven't seen before. I welcome all of these insights.
 
VanNess said:
Spotlight has a relatively secret feature that, while not quite the same thing as Google's spell-check/suggestion feature, is of similar usefulness.

If you type just the first few letters of a word into Spotlight's search box then press option-escape, a drop-down list will appear of correctly spelled words (courtesy of OS X's built-in dictionary) that begin with the letters you just typed. Select the word from the list and spotlight will use that for your search.
Click to expand...
wow. I didn't know that.
 
russed said:
i use it all the time to open applications

cmd - space

type it in

cmd - return to open the top hit





sooooooooo much quicker than opening finder and i dont need to move my hands from the keyboard!
Click to expand...

I didn't know about the Cmd + Return shortcut. This will save me some time. Thanks, man! :D
 
it doesn't find certain things for me... dunno why. And because I'll never know if it's not finding something that I really need, it's effectively useless... :( One of my great disappointments in apple.
 
Project said:
This interface looks FAR better. I love the hierarchical menu with the Projects etc folders there. Very nice.
Click to expand...
+1

I wish someone would have spoken up on this one.
 
I find that the best way to make Spotlight lightning quick is to disable some of the formats it searches.

I simply disabled system preference, bookmarks, fonts, and iCal events searches and it is now extremely fast on my iBook....
 
I think Quicksilver is better. For a start, Spotlight only finds things if you search from the first letter of the word. 'Saur' will not find 'Nanosaur'. With Quicksilver it will. It will also bring up 'Scripts (All UseRs) (Catalog)'. It's easy to scroll down/across to what you want. In addition, it's easy to allocate search terms to items. For example you can set 'n' to open Nanosaur every time. To open it therefore takes me this keystroke:

F13 (my choice of trigger key)
n
Enter

There's other stuff it does as well, and sometime I will read the website FAQ more carefully.

Someone will probably now tell me you can do every bit of this in Spotlight, but it didn't do it for me.
 
I use it frequently too, not a lot, but it's great that it looks for words inside the files, not just the title.
 
I reindexed my hard drive today and it's much faster. In Spotlight system prefs, drag the HD icon to the private area, then remove it again. This will reindex the volume. It took about 15 minutes on my 80GB Powerbook drive: well worth the wait.

Edit: I like Spotlight for the exif photo data searching that is possible. Makes finding certain pictures easier for me.
 
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