Chapter 3. Spotlight
Every computer offers a way to find files. But Spotlight, a star feature of macOS, shows matches for your search beyond your Mac; it can fetch results from the web, from Apple’s app and music stores, from the Maps app, from movie theaters, and so on. It’s also the world’s most flexible calculator. It can not only do math, but it can also convert things: kilometers to miles, Celsius to Fahrenheit, euros to dollars, and so on. And it can pull down even more information from the internet, like sports scores, weather, stock quotes, and lists of Vimeo and YouTube videos.
Even better, it understands “natural language” searches. That is, you can type out plain-English queries that describe what you’re looking for, like “files I worked on in January,” “slides from 2019 containing WidgeTech,” or “images from last year.”
Note
Spotlight also understands plain French, Italian, German, Simplified Chinese, and Spanish, if one of those is more your thing.
Get macOS Catalina: The Missing Manual now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.