Betalogue

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about a keyboard shortcut for revealing a Spotlight search result in the Finder that I only found out about fairly recently.

Betalogue readers have chimed in with a couple of other tips, so I thought I would share those as well.

First of all, when you do a Spotlight search with the system-wide Spotlight menu, in addition to using command-Return to reveal the currently selected result in the menu, you can also use option-Return as a shortcut for the “Show All” command, regardless of which search result is selected.

(Sadly, this “Show All” command still suffers from some annoying flaws, such as the fact that the view mode used by Mac OS X for the Finder window that the “Show All” command creates is… the view mode of the current foreground window in the Finder. I have never understood the logic of such a mechanism. What is the connection between the current foreground window in the Finder and the current Spotlight search? Spotlight is a system-wide menu. I might have invoked it from an entirely different application. I might not have used the Finder itself for the past two hours. What do I care what the view mode of the foreground window in the Finder is? What does that have to do with my Spotlight search?)

Another reader also writes that command-Up and command-Up can be used in the Spotlight menu to directly jump to the next category of search results (documents, images, music, etc.). And the Home/End and Page Up/Page Down keys can be used to jump directly to the top/bottom of the list of search results.

Finally, command-R can be used as an alternate shortcut for the “Reveal in Finder” command mentioned in my original post. In other words, it has the same effect as command-Return in the Spotlight menu.

Of course, there are plenty of other Spotlight-related tips out there. You can explore them at Mac OS X Hints, for example. It’s just that sometimes, it’s worth highlighting a specific shortcut or tip that might have easily been overlooked by many users for many years simply because, as Mac users, we don’t normally real the manual (or even bother to browse through Mac OS X’s crappy on-line help feature).

This entry was posted by Pierre Igot on Monday, June 1st, 2009 at 9:55 am and is filed under Macintosh. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.