How to use Spotlight in macOS Tahoe

In case you’ve not updated yet, macOS Tahoe is here, and it’s packing more than just a new Liquid Glass style for your Mac computer.

Aside from the arrival of the Journal app and a customizable Control Center, there’s a big new update for Spotlight. Apple’s launcher has been relatively unchanged for years now, and many users will no doubt have gravitated toward third-party alternatives like Alfred and Raycast.

Still, this latest update adds a lot of power-user functionality to the long-running tool, and I’ve put together this handy guide to help you make the most of it.

Set up your keyboard shortcut

Before we do any tweaking of Spotlight, you’ll need to know how to enable it. By default, it’s CMD and Space on your Mac’s keyboard, but if it doesn’t open then you’ll need to adjust that setting.

To do so, open System Settings and search ‘Spotlight’, then look in the sidebar for Keyboard settings. Make sure the ‘Show Spotlight search’ checkbox is ticked.

Launch some apps

It’s not new functionality, but if you’ve not used Spotlight before, then you might be surprised how much quicker it is to open apps using your keyboard as opposed to grabbing your mouse and navigating to the relevant folder.

Simply start typing, and you’ll be presented with a list of options. Move down with the arrow keys and hit return to jump into any of them.

Select what Spotlight surfaces

In System Settings, Spotlight’s sidebar entry will allow you to toggle on and off what you want to be able to find.

This includes results from apps, apps themselves, or files from certain folders and drives. If you don’t want to be able to look through certain folders or want to disregard, say, a Google Drive folder, this is the way to do it.

Enable Clipboard History

We’ve all been in that awkward spot where you’ve copied something from a page or app and can’t find it because you’ve hit CMD + C in the seconds since then, but Clipboard Search makes things much simpler.

By default, this is switched off, but at the bottom of the Spotlight section of System Settings, you can find a toggle for Clipboard Search. Enabling it will keep clipboard items available for eight hours, and you can find them by pressing CMD + 4.

Why’s it off by default? Because, as Apple mentions, it can involve storing personal information and having it available to paste. That’s worth considering if you share your Mac.

Use the Spotlight toolbar

New with macOS Tahoe is a subtle toolbar that appears if you start typing something in Spotlight.

Think of this as a filter of sorts, helping you drill down to the action you want to achieve. For example, being able to search for just folders or files can help save time rather than combing through apps, photos, and anything else.

You can trigger these filters with a ‘/’ command on your keyboard, which brings us nicely to…

Experiment with keyboard shortcuts

Apple has done a great job of putting keyboard shortcuts front and center when you jump into Spotlight, and it’s worth remembering them.

CMD with numbers 1 - 4 will bring up different options. CMD + 1 will give you your applications for quick launching, while CMD + 2 will do the same for Files. CMD + 3 triggers Actions and Shortcuts (more on that in a moment), while CMD + 4 is for clipboard history.

You can also use the up arrow to see your search history.

Have fun with Shortcuts

Shortcuts are a pretty intuitive way to set up Mac automations, and the whole system has progressively gotten more useful in recent years.

With that said, Spotlight’s new version gives a great way to trigger these automations since they’re always visible right when you need them. Can’t remember the keyboard shortcut you set to enter a meeting mode? Now you can hit Spotlight and trigger it from there with ease.

It’s not that you couldn’t do it before, but it’s just much easier to do so now without being flooded with a barrage of results when you hit CMD + Space.

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