OS X El Capitan: The Missing Manual

Chapter 3. Spotlight

Every computer offers a way to find files. And every system offers several different ways to open them. But Spotlight, a star feature of OS X, combines these two functions in a way that’s so fast, so efficient, so spectacular, it reduces much of what you’ve read in the previous chapters to irrelevance.

That may sound like breathless hype, but wait till you try it. You’ll see.

In El Capitan, Spotlight has had a tune-up. As in Yosemite before it, Spotlight now shows matches for your search word beyond your Mac; it can fetch results from the web, from Apple’s app and music stores, in the Maps app, from movie theaters, and so on. As a bonus, 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.

Additionally, Spotlight can now move or enlarge the search box, so it’s not blocking whatever you’re doing. And it can pull down more information types from the Internet, like sports scores (and schedules and rosters and player stats), Twitter handles (and hashtags), weather, stock quotes, and lists of Vimeo and YouTube videos.

Finally, you can now use “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 2014 containing WidgeTech,” or “images from last year.”