Mac OS X Leopard: The Missing Manual

The Spotlight Window

As you may have noticed, the Spotlight menu doesn't list every match on your hard drive. Unless you own one of those extremely rare 60-inch Apple Skyscraper Displays, there just isn't room.

Instead, Spotlight uses some fancy behind-the-scenes analysis to calculate and display the 20 most likely matches for what you typed. But at the top of the menu, you usually see that there are many other possible matches; it says something like "Show All," meaning that there are other candidates. (Mac OS X no longer tells you how many other results there are.)

There is, however, a second, more powerful way into the Spotlight labyrinth. And that's to use the Spotlight window, shown in Figure 3-2.

Spotlight Window from Spotlight Menu

If the Spotlight menu—its Most Likely to Succeed list—doesn't include what you're looking for, click Show All (or just press Return or Enter). You've just opened the Spotlight window.

Now you have access to the complete list of matches, neatly listed in what appears to be a standard Finder window.

Opening the Spotlight Window Directly

You can also open the Spotlight window directly, without using the Spotlight menu as a trigger.

Actually, there are three ways to get to the Spotlight window (Figure 3-2):

• ⌘-F (for Find, get it?). When you choose File→Find (or press ⌘-F), you get an empty Spotlight window, ready to fill in for your search.

• Option-⌘-Space bar. This keystroke opens the same window. But instead of starting empty and filling up, this window starts ...