How to quickly launch apps with Spotlight on Mac

Tired of trying to find a specific application or file on your Mac manually? With just one quick shortcut, you can quickly launch any application from anywhere with Spotlight Search. Here’s how to use it.

Spotlight Search

Spotlight is basically an extremely smart and useful search feature built into macOS – possessing a much more powerful search ability than the default search engines on many operating system platforms. other.

To launch Spotlight, in other words, quickly open an app from anywhere on your Mac, press Command + Space (space) on the keyboard. Or you can also click the little magnifying glass icon on your menu bar.

A search bar will immediately appear near the center of the screen. This is Spotlight Search – macOS’s system-wide search feature. Of course you can also drag the Spotlight window to anywhere on the desktop.

In the search bar, type the name of the app you want to launch – results will appear as you type. You will see a list of all search results that are related to the keyword. Spotlight will list the best matches first.

Just click on a best match to preview or open it. In case this is an app, you also only need to double click to open it. Or click the app’s icon in the results page, then press the Return key.

In addition to the ability to quickly search and launch any application on the system, Spotlight also allows you to make queries to any object on the system, from files, folders … to news recommendations. , sports scores, weather forecast.

Additionally, Spotlight can also suggest you variations of search results. For example, you can view those results in Spotlight or on the web through Safari. You can even enter math expressions, perform currency, temperature, or metric conversions into the Spotlight search field and get quick and accurate conversions or calculations. .