Spotlight made its first appearance on Mac more than a decade ago and still remains one of the most-loved features of macOS. What originally began as a humble file search tool, has now matured with tons of features up its sleeve. Apple adds new features to Spotlight in every major macOS release, so it’s easy to lose count of all the features. So, today I’ll tell you about all the cool things you can do with Spotlight on a Mac. Whether you’re a casual user or a power user, here are 15 Spotlight tips and tricks for Mac you should know in 2021.

As Spotlight is available on iOS as well, most of the tricks work on iPhone and iPad as well. So, if you are willing to get the most out of this handy search tool, you shouldn’t fail to try out these tips on iOS/iPadOS devices as well. Bear in mind that not all Spotlight features work in every country/region. If you don’t get the answer to your query, you can head over to Apple’s support page to check if it is supported in your country. That all being said, let’s explore the best Spotlight tips and tricks for macOS!

  • Search using Search operators
  • Search Using Boolean Operators
  • Instant Answers in Spotlight
  • Unit Conversion
  • Search Using Natural Language
  • Keyboard Shortcuts in Spotlight
  • Search Using Emojis
  • Search for Apps Using Initials
  • Track Live Flights
  • Resize or Move Around the Spotlight Window
  • Show Result from Selected Categories Only
  • Exclude a Folder/Disk From Spotlight Search
  • Make Spotlight Even Smarter
  • Clear Spotlight Search Query
  • Hide/Show Spotlight at Will

1. Search using Search operators

When searching for items in Spotlight, you can specify the type of item you’re looking for. To limit your search to a specific item type, just suffix “kind:item-type” after your actual query. Item types can be general file extensions like JPEG, MP3, PDF, or even Apple-specific apps like contacts, reminders, and emails, etc.

If you deal with a large number of emails on a daily basis, you can search for items relative to a date. For example, here’s how to search for emails received after a specific date by using “date: DD/MM/YY”.

You can use Boolean operators like AND, OR, NOT, AND NOT to create complex search queries. For instance, here’s how I used the Boolean query NOT to find all the emails in a particular date range, excluding the ones from a specific date.

Till now, we’ve seen how to use various search operators to search your files like a pro. But, Spotlight is much more than just a file-indexing engine. In this section, we’ll see how you can get instant answers to some queries. Please note that most of the instant answers should work on the Spotlight search on iOS devices, too.

  • Get exchange rates and convert one currency to another.

Pro tip: Hit CMD+L to jump directly to the inbuilt dictionary entry if there’s one.

4. Unit Conversion

Apart from being a useful currency converter, Spotlight can also double up as a super handy unit converter. So, the next time you need to convert units like weight, kilometer, temperature, look no further than this built-in search tool to give you the instant answer. For instance, you can enter 450km to miles in the Spotlight to get the exact figure in miles.

If you feel that all the search and Boolean operators are way too technical for you to use, there’s some good news. Starting 10.11 El Capitan, you can perform searches using natural language. Apple says that it “lets you compose your searches in your own words“. What that essentially means is that now you can search as if you’re having a natural conversation with a real person.

Here’s another one I used to find the documents I created last December:

Most of you would definitely know that CMD+Space brings up the Spotlight search, right? Well, let’s learn some keyboard shortcuts you can use to navigate in Spotlight and level up your Mac shortcuts game!

7. Search Using Emojis

If you’re feeling crazy, you can search Spotlight by typing in an emoji. For instance, when you type in a “Pizza” emoji, it lists all the Pizza places in the neighborhood:

8. Search for Apps Using Initials

By now, you probably are using Spotlight to quickly open installed apps on your Mac. While it is a swift way to open apps, it may sometimes be inconvenient to type in the name of the app, especially if the app’s name is longer. Thankfully, if an app’s name consists of multiple words, you can simply type in the initial of each word and Spotlight would still bring up that app. This way, you can save some keystrokes and a little bit of time.

While there is no dearth of live flight tracking apps, nothing can beat the convenience of having a native tool that can get the job done with the desired convenience. So, if you ever wonder what could be the current status of a flight, just enter the flight number in the Spotlight and it would instantly show the real status. For instance, if you want to find out the current status of IndiGo 6E 291, simply enter 6E 291 and it will show you the current status right away.

Apple finally introduced the option to resize the Spotlight window in El Capitan. To resize the Spotlight window, just drag the cursor from the lower end of the Spotlight window. However, you can only change the height of the window and you cannot make it smaller than the default size. Also, you can drag the window anywhere you like and set its desired position.

As you already know, Spotlight shows suggestions from a large number of sources, including local sources such as documents, contacts, and online sources such as emails and the web. If you would like to search for specific sources only, it’s possible to do that. Open Spotlight and type in “SP” to open System Preferences and click on “Spotlight” (already seeing the benefit of searching by app initials?).

You will see a list of categories where Spotlight will search for. Feel free to uncheck the box corresponding to the category that you do not want Spotlight to search for.

By default, Spotlight indexes most parts of your internal HDD/SSD including external hard disks. Sometimes, it may index temporary files and similar stuff, which in turn, may lead to results that are off the mark. Moreover, this can potentially slow down the Spotlight search.

While Spotlight remains a powerful tool for Mac, it is not perfect in all aspects. So, if you want to further improve its functionality by injecting some nifty plugins, I would recommend you to check out a neat app called “Flashlight” (free). What I love about this app the most is that it works quite reliably and allows you to add a wide assortment of plugins to Spotlight to enhance its capabilities.

The one thing that I don’t like about Spotlight is that it shows the previously searched results, even if you had closed it the last time. But bother not, there is a quick way to clear the Spotlight search query. All you have to do to get rid of the previous search result is to just press the Esc key.

Mac’s menu bar has limited space, so you don’t want to clutter it with unnecessary icons. Since we can invoke Spotlight with a simple CMD+Space keyboard shortcut, it doesn’t make any sense to allow its icon to take precious space on your Menu Bar. To hide Spotlight from appearing in the menu bar, follow the steps below.

Launch System Preferences on your Mac and then choose the Dock & Menu Bar.