Spotlight and Siri shortcuts
Make the Mac’s search engine and personal assistant truly work for you
Your Mac’s Spotlight search engine (opened by pressing ç+[ spacebar]) is a great way
to find your files and open apps. Siri, added in macOS Sierra, has a few tricks up its sleeve, too. Here are our favourite tips for making the most of both features.
1 Get word definitions
If you enter ‘define:’ (without quotes) as your first term in Spotlight and then type a word, the first result will be from your Mac’s dictionary.
2 Relocate Spotlight
If Spotlight’s results are getting in the way of what you’re comparing them with, move them to a convenient location by dragging from the magnifying glass in the window. (To reset the position, click and hold on Spotlight’s menu bar icon.)
3 Jump categories
After typing in Spotlight, quickly move down the results without reaching for your mouse or trackpad by pressing ç+æ to jump a category at a time.
4 Summing up
The Calculator app has been a stalwart of macOS for many years, but you don’t have to open it to perform quick calculations – type in Spotlight instead. Spotlight respects operator precedence (multiplication before addition, say), and you can use brackets to override this.
5 Avoid repeating
If Siri misinterprets what you’ve said, just click the words it thought you said and edit them using your keyboard to correct it. Press ® and Siri will reprocess your command.
6 Hands- on Siri
In cafés, offices and libraries, to name a few places, it’s more discreet to type commands and questions to Siri rather than speak them. To do this, you will need to change a setting in System Preferences’ Accessibility pane: select Siri in the left-hand column, check the box next to Enable Type to Siri, and the next time you invoke Siri using its Dock icon, menu bar icon or keyboard shortcut, it’ll expect you to type instead.