Spotlight Search Mac OS

• Mac Os Spotlight
• Spotlight On Mac

New updates are being added at the bottom of this story…….

Original story (published on December 15, 2020) follows:

Search for something On your Mac, click the Spotlight icon (if shown) in the menu bar, or press Command-Space bar or press (if available in the row of function keys on the keyboard). You can drag the Spotlight window anywhere on the desktop. Tip: If the Spotlight icon isn’t in the menu bar, add it using Dock & Menu Bar preferences. Get MacOS like Spotlight on your Linux Ubuntu, Linux Mint or other Linux distros as an alternative in the forms of Synapse. Mac OS is everybody’s favorite, and there are several reasons behind it. One of the most useful utilities you can find on Mac OS is Spotlight, which makes searching for things a piece of cake, all directly from the desktop.

Some Mac users who’ve installed the macOS Big Sur update on their devices are claiming that the Spotlight search function no longer works as it did prior to the update.

Users are disappointed since they aren’t able to rely on Spotlight to find the files, apps, documents, and other items they want to access quickly.

Moreover, there isn’t just a single problem that has ruined the user experience. Instead, there are several issues that degrade the function.

A user has listed some of the major issues that they noticed with the Spotlight search function after installing the macOS Big Sur update on their computer. We’ve shared a screenshot of it below:

As you can tell by the number of upvotes and comments on the user’s post on Reddit, many users who installed the macOS Big Sur updates are facing similar issues and agree that Apple has messed up Spotlight.

But this is also only part of a bigger picture because some users claim that Spotlight no longer works on their Macs after the macOS Big Sur update.

According to those who are dealing with this issue, Spotlight does not return any results when searching for files, apps, documents, and other items.

(Source)

ITs been weeks since I downloaded big sur and spotlight is still not working consistently. How has apple not patched this yet? (Source)

It seems that under Big Sur spotlight no longer indexes the content of RTF files. (To verify this create one with textedit, save it, search). This must be a bug / regression right? What could be a more canonical example of spotlight usage than finding text in RTF? (Source)

Ever since I updated to Big Sur, Spotlight is working pretty bad, sometimes it brings no results and sometimes it just freezes everything, apparently it only gets back to working after a system reboot 🙁 (Source)

While the issue does not affect all macOS Big Sur users, it’s clear that some are having terrible luck with getting Spotlight to function as normal.

Fortunately, there are a few workarounds that seem to have fixed most of the issues users are experiencing with the Spotlight search function.

Workarounds for macOS Big Sur Spotlight issues

1) Uninstall Little Snitch:

According to one user, the Little Snitch program might be the reason behind the Spotlight search issues for some. Therefore, uninstalling the program and reinstalling it should fix the problem.

uninstall LS completely. enjoy Spotlight working as expected. reinstall LS. enjoy Spotlight still working as expected. shake head about stupid LS bug that seems impossible to fix. (Source)

2) Give it time to index files:

Some users might be noticing the issue because Spotlight has not been able to index all the files on the computer after installing macOS Big Sur.

However, after some time, the problem automatically disappears since the system has enough time to index all the files on the Mac. Thus, you may want to give it some time for all files to be indexed.

I do not know how to reproduce this or whether it will come back, the problem came out of the blue and just vanished again. The best solution so far seems to me to just keep the machine running through the night and hope it will be done with whatever task that causes the problems by the next morning.. (Source)

3) Switch to Alfred:

It’s widely accepted that Alfred is better than the default Spotlight feature on macOS and thus many users who are fed up with the broken search function on macOS Big Sur are recommending others to switch to Alfred.

Why not use Alfred? Personally, Spotlight always felt like a gimped version of Alfred to me. (Source)

Mac Os Spotlight

At present, Apple has not acknowledged any issues reported by users when using Spotlight. The company has just rolled out the Big Sur 11.1 update, however, we didn’t come across any reports of the issue being fixed.

Nonetheless, we will continue to keep an eye out for any developments on the matter and will post an update if something relevant surfaces.

In the meantime, check out our dedicated tracker to know more about the status of bugs and issues found on macOS Big Sur.

Apparently, the Spotlight search function workaround that involved uninstalling Little Snitch also addresses the issue where the Recents folder wouldn’t show any content, but the search results appear when searching from within the folder.

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Get MacOS like Spotlight on your Linux Ubuntu, Linux Mint or other Linux distros as an alternative in the forms of Synapse.

Mac OS is everybody’s favorite, and there are several reasons behind it. One of the most useful utilities you can find on Mac OS is Spotlight, which makes searching for things a piece of cake, all directly from the desktop. While most developers have already designed similar utilities for Windows, the open-source Linux based operating systems are no exception, as well. Most Linux operating systems like Ubuntu have its own search functionality, but it can sometimes be troublesome to reach there and isn’t as powerful as Spotlight. So with Synapse for Linux, you can do just that, and boost the power of the search functionality on your system.

With Synapse for Ubuntu, you can even search for things on the web, which is cool, as well. Some Linux distros like Lubuntu, don’t offer decent search functionality, and Synapse can be a great solution in such cases. With Synapse, searching is easy with just the navigation buttons on your keyboard, and you are ready to go. Synapse can be downloaded and installed from the Linux official repository. Synapse can also be configured to run on startup so that too don’t need to search for, and open Synapse, each time you need to use it.

So without further delay let’s get started with how you can download and use Synapse on your Linux computer. Here we are using Ubuntu 19.04, the steps will be the same for Linux Mint, Debian, Elementary OS, Zorin OS, Depin and other Linux distros sharing the same stream.

Step 1: Open Command Terminal

You can search and open command terminal directly from the applications of your Linux OS, however, here we are using Ubuntu 19.04 and in Ubuntu or Linux Mint you can simply use the CTRL+ALT+T keyboard shortcut.

Step2: Install Synapse on Linux

Open the Terminal on your Linux system, and execute the following command to start installing Synapse.

Step 3: Synapse additional packages installation confirmation

Once the process starts, you will be asked for a confirmation about whether you want to make changes to the system. Synapse also require some additional packages, the download, and installation of which will be taken care of by the package manager itself. Just type ‘y‘ and hit the enter key to proceed with the installation.

You might be asked to enter the password for security requirements.

Step 4: Run Synapse app

Once the installation is complete, just go to the ‘Apps’ section to search for ‘Synapse’. Open the following icon that appears.

Just type in something to find the results appear just below the search box.

Step 6: What you can do on it?

You can even navigate across what exactly you want to search, with the left and right arrow keys. You can search for audio files, applications, places, documents, videos, contacts, places or you can even search the web directly from Synapse.

Just hit the enter key to open the selected item. You can use the shortcut key i.e. ‘Ctrl+Space‘ to open Synapse and search for something instantly.

Depending upon your requirements, you can even change the shortcut key to start this search app with a different key combination. Thus, this MacOS spotlight alternative on your Linux system will make it possible for you to search for anything you want, directly from the Synapse search bar. It is also possible to execute some commands without opening the Terminal and carry out some small and medium-sized calculations directly from the Synapse search bar without the need of opening the system calculator.

In the Unity desktop that comes with Ubuntu, I didn’t find the taskbar icon. But you can easily find that on other desktop environments like LXDE, XFCE, etc. to change the settings associated with the app.

Hope the information was useful for you. Do you have any questions in mind? Feel free to comment the same down below.

Spotlight On Mac

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