Switching to the Mac: The Missing Manual, Mountain 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, you usually see that there are many other possible matches; it says, “Show All in Finder,” meaning that there are other candidates.

There is, however, a second, more powerful way into the Spotlight labyrinth. And that’s to use the Spotlight window, shown in Figure 3-14.

You can open the Spotlight window in either of two ways:

Figure 3-14. Top: The Spotlight window stands ready to search the currently open window. Middle: When you begin to type your search term, OS X presents a pop-up menu of suggestions. For example, when you type apple, it’s asking: “Would you like me to limit the search results to files with the word ‘apple’ in their names?” If you ignore the suggestions, the window shows you all matches—including files with the word “apple” inside them. Bottom: But if you click one of those suggestions—“Filename contains ‘apple,’” in this case—the results window changes. Now you’re seeing only icons that contain the word “apple.”

From Spotlight Menu

If the Spotlight menu—its Most Likely to Succeed list—doesn’t include ...