Spotlight on Spotlight

Global Spotlight on the Mac

Ever click the magnifying glass on your Mac’s menu bar? Doing so reveals Spotlight Search. When you do so the first time, your Mac shares some of the things Spotlight can help you find, including applications, documents, websites, calendar events, and more.

The default keyboard shortcut for Spotlight is Command+Space. Just type what you want to find. I recommend using the arrow keys to navigate and Return to open the selected item. (You can mouse and double-click, but I find that slower.)

So, next time we’re in a coaching session and I instruct you to open, say, Disk Utility and you can’t find it in the Dock, just use Spotlight.

You can also hold Command to reveal the path to a given item on your Mac. To clear a search, just press Escape, as discussed in Escape to Get Out. To close Spotlight, press Escape when the field is empty or press Command+Space again.

You can find all of the search categories in the Spotlight pane of System Preferences. By default, they are listed alphabetically. If you wish, you can also rearrange the categories so they appear in Spotlight in your desired order.

If you find that Spotlight is failing to search your Mac or find items you known you have, it may need to be reset:

1. Open System Preferences > Spotlight > Privacy
2. Add your startup disk (Macintosh HD or whatever you’ve named it)
3. Accept the warning about preventing Spotlight from searching in your drive
4. Immediately remove your drive from the list

Spotlight will proceed to reindex your stuff and you should be able to find it again.

[Update: In System Settings, you cannot rearrange search categories. For Privacy, look for Spotlight Privacy: in macOS 13–15.0.1, at the bottom of Siri & Spotlight; in macOS 15.1 and later, at the bottom of Spotlight.]

Spotlight in an Application

If you only want to search in a particular application, such as Finder, Mail, or Photos, you can do so there. Find the magnifying glass on the toolbar or use the keyboard shortcut Command+F or Command+Option+F (sometimes Command+F has a different purpose, like finding text inside a Mail message).

You probably search in these apps all the time and never realized that Spotlight was behind it. Did you know that you can search for generic items in Photos and get relevant results?

Global Spotlight on iPhone and iPad

On your Apple mobile devices, you can call up Spotlight by swiping down from the middle of:

• any home screen (with your app icons)
• the lock screen (you’ll see fewer results when your device is locked)
• the screen when at the top of your notifications in Notification Center, which you get when you swipe down from the center top
• the screen when at the top of your widgets, which you find to the left the lock screen, Notification Center, or the first home screen

In iOS 16 and later, you can also tap Search at the bottom of any home screen, just above the Dock. (If you don’t like it there, go to Settings > Home Screen > Search and toggle Show on Home Screen.)

Why would you want to search on your iPhone? You might have trouble finding an app among your seven home screens, or you might habitually use search to find certain apps. Or, you might want to search across your applications for a particular document, shared link, etc., rather than searching in each app individually.

For example, a friend shared a link to an article and I couldn’t remember if it was in Mail or Messages, so Spotlight helped me find it. Then, from the results, I could further search a given app where there were several possibilities.