The Switch To Mac

This post is the third part of a three-part series on
the Spotlight utility.

Each Finder window contains its own Spotlight search field on the right-hand side of the toolbar.
As soon as you begin to type in a search term in the textbox, Spotlight starts its searching immediately.
It will return with only files and folders matching your search term in the current window; this search
is more focused than the Spotlight search that occurs from the menu bar.  Note that the resulting items
are aliases to the files and folders; these items remain in their original locations. The window
will change into a Finder Search window with extra search options appearing below the toolbar
as displayed in the Figure 1 below.

Figure 1 -The default display for Finder is showing items in icons mode.

The screens shown in this post have been
changed to the detail mode. Click on any of them to enlarge.

Looking at the Finder Search bar – just underneath Spotlight textbox section, notice the This Mac – “Documentation” -
Contents – File Name – Save – (plus sign)  bar. You can refine your search depending upon the item that you choose.

This Mac ==>  This is the default option. Spotlight will look for files and folders on your boot volume.

Current Folder ==> When I opened this Finder window I navigated over to the Macintosh HD – Developer – Documentation
folder. The Documentation folder became my Current Folder for this finder search. I can select the current folder
to narrow my search.

Contents and File Name ==> These are two more option buttons to further narrow the search. Choosing Contents
will search within files; choosing File Name will search for files matching the search string.

Save ==> This button allows you to save your search for reuse later.

Plus Sign (+) ==> This button allows you to customize your search by letting you choose additional search conditions.
The additional fields include Kind, Last Opened Date, Last Modified Date, Created Date, Name, Contents and Other.
Here is a screenshot (Figure 2) of what it looks like with a few additional conditions.

Figure 2

For Kind I chose Document and for Last Opened Date I asked for the files opened within the last 5 days.

Spotlight is a very powerful utility. A user can get as sophisticated as he/she wants to be in looking for files
and folders. I hope you learned something new from this series of posts. This concludes this Spotlight series.

This post is second in a series about the Spotlight utility.

Figure 1 – Spotlight Categories

If you make a mistake when typing in Safari in the textbox, you can either backspace over
the error or you can simply click on the X in the round gray circle and the textbox area will
clear (please refer to the top of Figure 1). You can then retype your correct search term.

You can also refine your search by using the keyword kind followed by a colon followed
by the category (kind+colon+category) ==> e.g.  kind:applications
So to find applications you could type kind:appli in the textbox. You may find that
even before you finish typing the whole word ‘applications’, Spotlight will display its applications list.

Figure 2 – Spotlight – refined search

Other ‘kind:category’ search combination strings that you may find useful are:

1) kind:documents
2) kind:folders
3) kind:mes     (Messages)
4) kind:contacts
5) kind:event    (Events and Todos)
6) kind:images
7) kind:pdf        (pdf documents)
8) kind:music
9) kind:movies
10) kind:fonts
11) kind:presentations

Note: Items in parentheses are not to be typed in

By the way, how did I know what the categories were that I could work with
in Spotlight? Take a look at Figure 2. At the bottom of the list is the
last item which is not part of the search, but is Spotlight Preferences.
If you click on it, a preferences popup will appear which looks like this:

Figure 3 – Spotlight Preferences

You can see all the categories that are available for the Spotlight search.
You can check and uncheck categories that you want to appear or not.
In addition, note in the bottom of the box you can set keyboard shortcuts
for bringing up Spotlight (from the menu bar) or the Spotlight window
which is using Spotlight in a Finder window. As a side note, the character that
looks like a backslash represents the alt-option key; the four-leaf clover character
represents the command key.

We’ll take a look at using Spotlight in Finder in the 3rd and last segment
of this series.