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TUAW Tip: Quickly reveal enclosing folders in Spotlight

by Conrad Quilty-Harper Jul 27th 2006 at 12:00PM



I don't know whether it's just me, but the one thing that I've always felt was lacking from Spotlight was the ability to quickly and easily reveal the enclosing folder for search results. It was never a major problem, but on the rare occasion when I do use Spotlight, I often seem to need to see the search result's containing folder. Earlier I was looking up a rogue "mds" process which was hogging 60% of my MacBook's CPU when I came across an article on Macintouch, with this little tidbit at the end from Chong-Yee.

"Apple's "Spotlight Tips" page is good, but doesn't include the following tip I discovered. If you want to reveal a file in its enclosing folder from the drop down Spotlight results list, hold down the Command key and click the result."

This is probably something I should have discovered on my own anyway (holding down Command during any action in OS X usually reveals some kind of useful alternative action), but because the problem wasn't so annoying that I felt the need to research it (hence my accidental discovery) I never thought to try. Usually I'd click "show all", and then right click the item and press "reveal in Finder". That usually took a few seconds -- now the process takes less than a single second.

This personal example reminds me of Steve Garfield's entertaining interview with David Pogue (seriously, check out the bit at the end where David sings and plays the piano) where he talks about cool shortcuts that developers put into their work which, for whatever reason, don't make their way in the official documentation.

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I don't know whether it's just me, but the one thing that I've always felt was lacking from Spotlight was the ability to quickly and easily...
 

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Neil M

Thanks for the flag advice Conrad. Now does anybody know a hack to replace it with the Saltire? :-)

July 28 2006 at 5:35 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Jacques Lema

Damn.. been looking for something like that since day one. Really saves times. I really wish Apple had an official list of the most useful shortcuts.. .including these.

July 28 2006 at 4:50 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
m2habert

Spotlight inconsitency: command-return for the "briefed" spotlight, but command-r for the "Show All" Spotlight window...

I would rather they stick with using only command-r: same shortcut used by iTunes for the same purpose.

July 28 2006 at 1:19 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Victor Agreda, Jr.

Whoa. This is cool, and (as you can see) saves a lot of us time. I hated Spotlight on my old iBook. It would crawl in a few results at first, only to eventually slam me with more... it was like a videogame, trying to click the one I wanted before it disappeared... ADD for everyone!

July 27 2006 at 11:56 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
sjk

Re: Going the keyboard-only route, selecting and using command+return works as well.

Command-return can behave differently (and seemingly inconsistently) depending on when it's invoked and which kind of item is selected. Sometimes it'll open (launch) the item; other times its enclosing folder. Examples:

Typically I'll launch Disk Utility using "command space d i s k command return", with that second command key selecting Disk Utility as the Top Hit. But occasionally the Utilities folder is opened instead, with the Disk Utility app selected in it.

Today I discovered Spotlight's command-return insists on extracting PithHelmet-2.6.7.tbz with BOMArchiveHelper instead of opening its enclosing folder. I'm not sure what causes certain files to have that stubborn open/launch behavior.

July 27 2006 at 8:32 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Conrad Quilty-Harper

Neil, go to System Preferences, "International", click on the "Input Menu" tab and check the little box at the bottom that says "show input menu in menu bar". If you have UK English selected it should show a Union Jack.

July 27 2006 at 7:10 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Neil M

Good stuff.
Just out of interest - and sorry to go off-topic - which app installed the little union flag on your menu bar?
Or does it just mean "English spoken here" ? :-)

thanks

July 27 2006 at 7:00 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
aes

THANK YOU

July 27 2006 at 2:27 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Buthidae

Haha, I can't believe I didn't think of this! Thanks!

July 27 2006 at 1:17 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
DidYouLoseASock

Thank you so much.

July 27 2006 at 12:42 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
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