Filed under: Productivity, Odds and ends, TUAW Tips
TUAW Tip: Quickly reveal enclosing folders in Spotlight
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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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Greg said 12:09PM on 7-27-2006
You just saved me hours of wasted time! Thank you.
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Allan said 12:11PM on 7-27-2006
Going the keyboard-only route, selecting and using command+return works as well.
Though this has been on macosxhints.com already, I'm all for spreading this wonderful tip via as many outlets as possible ^_^.
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Aaron Jacobs said 12:23PM on 7-27-2006
This shortcut makes sense -- holding down command and clicking works on items in the dock as well.
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Noah D said 12:29PM on 7-27-2006
Oh man, I'm so glad this exists. I too was annoyed to always be "showing all" and then right-clicking. Muchas gracias.
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andy said 12:41PM on 7-27-2006
WOW, thank you sooooo much!!!!!! so annoying having to open the main spotlight window to do this.
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DidYouLoseASock said 12:42PM on 7-27-2006
Thank you so much.
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Buthidae said 1:17PM on 7-27-2006
Haha, I can't believe I didn't think of this! Thanks!
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aes said 2:27PM on 7-27-2006
THANK YOU
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Neil M said 7:00PM on 7-27-2006
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
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Conrad Quilty-Harper said 7:10PM on 7-27-2006
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.
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sjk said 8:32PM on 7-27-2006
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.
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Victor Agreda Jr said 11:56PM on 7-27-2006
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!
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m2habert said 1:19AM on 7-28-2006
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.
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Jacques Lema said 4:50AM on 7-28-2006
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.
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Neil M said 5:35AM on 7-28-2006
Thanks for the flag advice Conrad. Now does anybody know a hack to replace it with the Saltire? :-)
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