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Snow Leopard: Find what you're looking for

by Kevin Harter Aug 29th 2009 at 1:45PM

One of the little frustrations in my everyday use of Leopard was the way it searched in folders. When in a Finder window, there was a handy-looking search box in the upper right-hand corner. I would place the cursor, type my query, and be annoyed by the fact that OS X searched my entire Mac.

Nooo. If I wanted to search the whole thing, I would have asked to search the whole thing.

Thank goodness Snow Leopard fixes this minor workflow speed bump. Now you can choose what you'd like to use as a default: Search This Mac or Search the Current Folder. You can even say "I'll have another" by choosing to Use the Previous Search Scope.

Unfortunately the default out-of-the-box action is still set to look everywhere on your Mac. But don't worry, it's easy to change.
  1. Make sure Finder is your active app (either click on the Finder icon in the dock, click the desktop or a visible Finder window, or cmd-Tab to switch to the Finder).
  2. Choose Preferences in the Finder menu. Or you can just use the Command-comma key combo to invoke Preferences.
  3. In Finder Preferences, click on the Advanced tab.
  4. Choose your desired search scope from the drop-down menu under the heading "When performing a search."
  5. Close the Preferences and enjoy a search or two.
That's it. Just one example of the many little changes in Snow Leopard that make life with the OS easier and more efficient. I hope you find what you're looking for!

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One of the little frustrations in my everyday use of Leopard was the way it searched in folders. When in a Finder window, there was a...
 

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Neil Anderson

Glad to see the option.

September 03 2009 at 1:29 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Lukas Smith

w00t

August 30 2009 at 6:51 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
MIchael

what I like about this feature is the fact that I can finally stick more items into a folder and find what I need, so I don't have to hunt through several folders or organize things so much that it takes me 10 minutes to find what I want!

August 30 2009 at 12:20 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
bob

Hmm, that is interesting you feel that way. This search box searching my entire computer is one of my most favourite features of OS/X. The fact that when I need to open a file, I can just type its name rather than having to do 10-20 mouse clicks is such a time saver.

This is one of the features I used to sell OS/X to people (:

Im a bit disappointed now that this box will have different functionality depending on which computer you are using. I think it will make using OS/X more confusing for some people.

August 29 2009 at 9:47 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
1 reply to bob's comment
Kevin Harter

In my mind, the Spotlight search on the menu bar should be global while the search box in a Finder window should default to just that folder (and maybe even subfolders). But I appreciate your point of view as well. I guess why they decided to make it an option.

And I understand what you mean about losing the consistency by offering the choice, but it would require getting rid of all customization to have true uniformity.

For Apple (and Microsoft, for that matter), it's a case of being damned if you do, damned if you don't. There's no right answer, and none that would please everyone.

August 29 2009 at 11:18 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
dagamer43

I still wish I could set all Finder windows to be uniform in size instead of having silly "per folder" settings. And yes, I know about the trick where you open a Finder window, adjust it to the size you want, and then immediately close it, but that setting doesn't seem to be uniformly applied to all Finder windows.

-_-

August 29 2009 at 4:41 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Lachlan Hunt

Hooray! Ever since I switched to Mac 2 years ago, this has annoyed the hell out of me. I can't wait till I can finally get a copy of Snow Leopard (when the Family Pack is finally shipped to stores). However, I really hope there's also a way to search filename by default, instead of contents, since it's rare that I don't know the name of the file I want.

August 29 2009 at 3:03 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
2 replies to Lachlan Hunt's comment
Dorv

I'm assuming you don't mean Apple Stores...?

I got my Family Pack on launch day at the ABQ Apple Store.

August 29 2009 at 9:07 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Lachlan Hunt

Yeah, I meant stores in Norway. There are no official Apple stores here, and none of the resellers received any copies of the family pack. Although, I may end up waiting a month or two until I'm in the US anyway, since the cost of the single user pack (269 NOK) here costs nearly the same as the family pack does in the US, and the family pack (450 NOK) is roughly $30 more. It'd also be nice if I got all the packaging and booklets that come with it in English instead of Norwegian.

August 30 2009 at 4:43 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
FightTheFuture

didn't 10.2 Jaguar search by folder only?

when leopard came out, i assumed apple changed the focus to system-wide-search because the majority of low-end intel machines could handle it easily, while i was out of luck with an older PPC machine. if i wanted to search the entire hard drive, i would've selected the hard drive!

August 29 2009 at 2:57 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
1 reply to FightTheFuture's comment
brian

Yes. 10.3 too. 10.4 changed the behavior. I *hated* searching in 10.4 compared to how good 10.3 was. 10.5 got better and I'm now looking forward to 10.6 even more. :-)

August 29 2009 at 7:59 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
SIP

Being able to close the Sidebar is the big one for me.

August 29 2009 at 2:45 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Hobbes

That was one of my biggest frustrations as well and I was very happy when I found this option in Snow Leopard. Woo hoo!!!! Bit by bit they're getting all the annoyance out of the system.

August 29 2009 at 2:32 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Chris G.

Great tip, thanks! That has been always been an annoyance I have had with OS X.

August 29 2009 at 2:22 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
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