Switching to the Mac: The Missing Manual, Lion Edition

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, it usually says something like “Show All,” meaning that there are other candidates.

There is, however, a second, more powerful way into the Spotlight labyrinth. And that’s the Spotlight window, shown in Figure 3-11.

From the Spotlight Menu

If the Spotlight menu—its Most Likely to Succeed list—doesn’t include what you’re looking for, then click Show All in Finder. 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.

Figure 3-11. The Spotlight window either lists nothing (top)—or everything on your hard drive (bottom), depending on how you open it. Either way, it’s ready to search your entire hard drive (except other people’s Home folders). But Spotlight has many tricks up its software sleeve.

From the Finder

When you’re in the Finder, you can also open the Spotlight window directly, without using the Spotlight menu as a trigger. Actually, there are three ways to get there:

• -F (for Find, get it?). When you choose File→Find ( ...