Find faster with Spotlight & Siri
Stop wasting time searching for stuff – use Spotlight and Siri for speedy results!
1 Let Siri suggest stuff
Catalina adds Siri Suggestions to your favourite apps. In Safari, Siri can suggest websites you might want to visit; in Contacts it focuses on the people it thinks you’re most likely to contact; in Mail it recognises events in emails and adds them to a Siri Suggestions calendar. If you’d rather not have those suggestions you can turn them off on a per-app basis in System Preferences > Siri.
2 Find system features
Siri enables you to access system and app features as well as to look things up, so for example if you have ‘Enable Ask Siri’ checked in System Preferences > Siri you can say “turn on Do Not Disturb”, “create a meeting for today at 11am” or “How much free space do I have?” You can make your screen brighter, launch an app, create an email to a specific person, send a message, search for something in your Photos library, find a podcast with a particular host… Siri on Mac is now as useful as it is on iOS.
3 Share from Siri
images, you can then drag images from the results onto your desktop, into an email or onto a document. Siri drags the full image, not the thumbnail it showed you. The feature is a little hit-and-miss for other kinds of content, though: for example, if the result is a piece of information, you’ll need to highlight the text and copy it manually.
4 Save Spotlight searches
When you use Spotlight to search in the Finder, you can save your search as a Smart Folder that you can run instantly at any time. This puts it in SavedSearches and you can also add it to Finder’s Sidebar.
5 Scale down Spotlight
If you find Spotlight is searching too many things or taking too long, you can limit its scope in System Preferences > Spotlight – so if you never look for fonts or films, you can exclude them.