[Macworld]

Post your comments for Mac 101: Seek and find here

[michelp]

One thing is to list the results, another one is to know where they are located on your hard disk.
Position your mouse on a result, then click while holding down the Cmd key.
At the bottom of the preview window, you will see the name of the file, and a couple of seconds later, its exact location.

[michelp]

Quote

One thing is to list the results, another one is to know where they are located on your hard disk. Position your mouse on a result, then click while holding down the Cmd key. At the bottom of the preview window, you will see the name of the file, and a couple of seconds later, its exact location.

In Spotlight.

[ZombieReagan]

Nice article, Chris. I hope you consider offering a survey of Spotlight font-ends like HoudahSpot and Tembo.

I've used HoudahSpot for years for its ease in customizing and saving/automating searches. Macworld gave it 4-mice four and a half years ago(!) - maybe readers could benefit from updated reviews/comparisons of it and Tembo some time soon.

[RhymingDesigner]

Don't forget EasyFind and Alfred.

[ZombieReagan]

Neither EasyFind nor Alfred are Spotlight frontends. They of course do searches, but cannot search inside files nearly as quickly as Spotlight, which relies on its virtual index created in the background. That's why a well-designed frontend can be so useful.

[dshan]

Quote

One thing is to list the results, another one is to know where they are located on your hard disk. Position your mouse on a result, then click while holding down the Cmd key. At the bottom of the preview window, you will see the name of the file, and a couple of seconds later, its exact location.

It has always been a mystery to me why Spotlight make obtaining this information, pretty much the most important thing you want to know from a search, so difficult and unintuitive. In 10.6 and earlier at least you could hover the pointer over a search result and get a tooltip showing the file's location, but since Lion that's gone and Spotlight will only tell you where the file is if you remember an obscure keyboard action.

It's crazy, the location of every file spotlight returns should be displayed along with it's name and other information in the search results list. Spotlight is virtually useless without this info, why do Apple want to hide it from us?

[CatOne]

Quote

Neither EasyFind nor Alfred are Spotlight frontends. They of course do searches, but cannot search inside files nearly as quickly as Spotlight, which relies on its virtual index created in the background. That's why a well-designed frontend can be so useful.

Alfred can do this. It uses Spotlight's index for everything, and can search in files using the 'in' keyword. So for example typing 'in cookies' will search in all Spotlight indexed files for the word cookies.

[ZombieReagan]

You are right about Alfred's keyword "in," but that's a pretty primitive kludge compared to the apps I was talking about.

Houdahspot has a pop-up menu of templates to let you search specifically inside apps, emails, documents, music, photos, recent files and more, and checkboxes in the menubar-based search window to quickly limit searches to file name, file contents, or even the comments metadata. And if you launch the Houdahspot app itself you are presented with a more complete and easy to use superset of the customizable Finder-based searches this article describes, in which you can do fuzzy searches on terms, and build queries with mandatory words/phrases and specific words/phrases to exclude. And you can build customized search templates, save them and reuse them. For someone like me who has tens of thousands of document files accumulated over the years having a sophisticated search app is a must.

I owned HoudahSpot years before Tembo came out but that might be a good app as well -- it appears to do what HoudahSpot does but with a nicer-looking interface but I don't know how it performs.

[Petew]

Thanks Chris, kudos.
Question: after entering a search and seeing a list of results, then doing something else and going back to Spotlight, the results are still there - it seems like only a few seconds or so, but if you wait longer they are gone. Why is that? Is there a way of keeping the results there until another search is entered?
Thanks.

[josermv]

Excellent summary! Thanks.

[pacroon]

Excellent article but michelp really got me the answer which has frustrated me many times. I wanted to use a file in another program - and wanted to know exactly where it was on the computer. Just searching for the file name is fine and brings it up quite quickly, but Spotlight does not show you its location. Thanks michelp

[planewryter]

Thanks, Chris!

Is there a list--or would you be willing to create and post one--of all the "Search Tokens" supported by Spotlight (e.g., from, kind...various treatments of date, etc.)?

Also, can the boolean operators be used to exclude certain types?

For example: Spotlight, search for all instances of 'breen' AND NOT kind:email?

Commendations on such a helpful article; thanks, again.

[udo2]

Question: I am running OS X 10.8.2. There is no "Look Up" Item in my Spotlight menu. Not just greyed out, it is not there at all. Can't find a preference setting for it either.

Anybody knows how I get get the "Look Up" item?