[Music]
- [Don] Hi, this is Don McAllister,
and welcome to another ScreenCastsOnline
weekly tip video.
Spotlight is the underlying indexing technology built
in to both the Mac and iOS, and it allows
you to quickly find many different types
or categories of information on your device.
So let's take a look at Spotlight on the Mac.
Spotlight allows you to access many
different types of information,
run applications, search for things,
and it's normally invoked in one of two ways,
either by a keyboard shortcut which is
usually command space bar.
I can just say type in safari,
hit return and that will run the application for me.
Let me just quit out of Safari.
Or I can use the Siri option.
If I go up to here, say open Safari.
And that loads the application as well.
But before we drill down too much into using Spotlight,
let's go ahead and have a look at how it's configured.
So again I'll use command space bar
and I'll actually type in Spotlight.
It's a system preference option
so if I hit return, that will open Spotlight
in System Preferences for me.
Now in this first panel, we can actually check
off those categories that we want to appear
in our Spotlight search results.
So currently everything is checked.
Applications, Bookmarks, Calculator, Contacts, etc.
So these are all the different types
of categories of information that will appear
in Spotlight search results.
Also down at the bottom, we've got the option
to allow Spotlight suggestions when we'd use
a lookup feature and that's for instance
if we go across to Safari, if I actually highlight
Eurovision, I can control right click,
and I get the option to look up Eurovision.
That will give me the dictionary definition
but then I also have these options here,
so Wikipedia, I can scroll across using
a two-finger gesture so I've got news,
Apple music, Twitter, etc.
Okay, so that's just a quick way of finding
more information when you use Lookup.
Let me put Safari down out of the way.
So there are the different categories
but also you have a Privacy setting as well.
Now the privacy panel allows you to exclude
or prevent Spotlight from searching
specific locations whether or not they be
a specific folders or even entire disc volumes.
Now here, I actually have a separate disc volume
on this machine.
In fact, if I go across to the Finder,
I've actually got three partitions,
three volumes on this machine.
I've got Macintosh HD.
I've got MVPData and I've got my bootable partition
which is this one SCO HD.
So that's the one I'm actually booting off
at the moment.
So when I do a Spotlight search, I don't really want
it to search on Macintosh HD.
That's actually a separate partition
that contains another instance of macOS.
So I don't want it to search on there.
Consequently, I've actually included it in this list.
If I want to exclude that third partition,
if I hit the plus button,
and if I go to my machine in sidebar,
and I'll select MVPData, that's another partition.
I'll just say Choose.
So any data held in that partition is now also excluded
from Spotlight searches.
A quick tip, if you want to re-index Spotlight,
what you can do is to add your bootable partition
into this list and then remove it
and that will automatically kick off
a re-indexing of Spotlight.
And then finally down here at the bottom
we've got the option to change our keyboard shortcuts.
So I'm currently using a Show Spotlight search
of command space.
There's also the option to show a Finder search window
which is alt command space.
Basically if I hit that option alt command space,
that will produce the Finder and drop me straight
into the Search panel here.
But we'll leave that for now.
Okay, let's go back to Spotlight itself.
My privacy is now all set up.
Let's go ahead and have a look
at some Spotlight functionality.
So we'll go down our Spotlight preferences window.
I'll use command space bar to invoke Spotlight search
and if I just type something in,
so screen, right, so these are all
the various options I have available to me now,
so I've got screenFlow documents
that I'm currently working on.
I've the Screens application, Screen Sharing,
some other applications to do with screen Capto
which is a screen capture application,
and then if we just move through this list,
I've got some system preferences.
I'm just using the arrow keys,
I can use the arrow keys to move up and down,
and I can see in the right hand panel
exactly what it is I'm looking at.
If I keep scrolling down, I've got some
application settings, web videos, etc., etc.
Now this is a PDF that it's found
on my hard drive.
If I want to see the path of this particular PDF,
if I just hit command, you can see the path
down here at the bottom.
Okay, that's the full path.
If I want to get information on the file,
I can use command I.
And that will give me the Get Info panel
of that particular file.
Let me show you one other thing connected
with Files as well.
If I do command space bar, if I actually type
in s-c-o, right, I've got this file here,
sco Icon Resize.workflow.zip.
Now were I to hit enter, in fact I'll do that,
we'll see what happens.
It will open the Finder, but it is,
or it has rather, actually unpacked that file for me.
So there's the zip file and this is
the workflow file that was contained within zip.
Perhaps you don't want to do that.
Let me delete that.
If I pop this down again, if I go back into here,
rather than using just Enter,
if I do command enter, it will open the Finder
and show me that file without actually running the file.
So hit return if you want to run the file,
command return if you just want to see
the file in the Finder.
Okay, so let's take a look at some other party tricks
that Spotlight can do.
And we would have such things as calculations.
So two plus four equals six.
And we've got such things as unit conversions.
So 100 US dollars and defaults to British Pounds Sterling
but I can also see Euros, Yen, Dollars and Swiss Francs.
If I want weather reports, the weather in London say,
it gives me a fully featured weather report.
I can check on stocks.
So there's the current Apple stock.
Now of course I can use Siri to invoke
Spotlight searches and I can configure Siri.
If I go to System Preferences and find Siri,
rather than going up to the icon
in the menu bar each time, if I go to Siri here,
you'll see that the keyboard shortcut is
to hold command space.
If I close that down and let's do a quick
natural language search (Siri beeps).
What's the weather like in London?
- [Siri] Okay, here's the weather for London for today.
- [Don] Show me my emails from today.
- [Siri] There are nine emails received today.
- [Don] So that is using the Spotlight search
to interrogate my inbox and just pull out
those emails that I've received today.