MacTricksAndTips.com

We are about a third of the way through the Noob2Pro series, todays post will be on Spotlight. The searching tool built into the Mac operating system. Spotlight is designed to find the files you want. It built deep into the system and you will find you use to a lot to find the files you want. There is a lot of options which you can use to take control of Spotlight. I am going to mention a couple of them here.

While browsing the webs in the small moments of free time I actually have I came across a really interesting post about using Terminal tips for improving spotlight. You can find the post over at Mac Tips, I recommend you give it a good read. I wish I had thought of some of the tips on the site. While I am here I would like to point out one Terminal tip that you should find useful.

Normally when you do a search in Finder and you use Spotlight, files in system folders folders will be hidden. This is due to the fact that most of the files you never need to modify, see or use. But every so often you may want to find a file or folder which is a system file. The process is rather simple, but as usual hidden away, where you would normally never find it. The idea and most of the steps to this post came from Dale, after I had ran out of ideas yesterday and posted for help on Twitter.

Quite a while ago I did a post about narrowing down searches using the kind: operator. I have been looking and testing out different operators that help you narrow down searches but with different operators. They are really simple and help out a lot if you end up with humongous search results.

The problem with find is that some times it is “too good”. If there is such a thing. As a result if you want to search for something simple, for example the search term “red”. It will find every single file and folder that has the word red in it. This is all well as good, but most of the time you end up with thousands of results, and you spend the next ten minutes scrolling down the list until you reach the place you want. But there is a quicker way, hence the post, to narrow down the searches for a specific file or folder type. This means that if you have a file that you know is an image you can show only the image files. It is super easy, and only requires a bit more typing.

This is a little software plugin for Safari that enables you to improve the way you search. As the tag line of the application says it is like spotlight for the web. It gives you a bit more functionality such as refined searches with small descriptions, as well as this it also looks really cool.

Whats 25*253? Its a hard sum to do (the answer is 6325). Calculator is usually the only way to work out such a sum with out being a maths genius. But spotlight has a cool little feature than enables you to do basic calculations.