How to Turn on OS X’s Spotlight With a Flashlight
When we first started talking about Flashlight, it was still in beta testing . Even then, it was a promising way to improve OS X Yosemite’s Spotlight with more search results. The app is now a lot more mature and with tons of plugins it’s incredibly powerful. Let’s take a look at how to set it up and find some of the most useful plugins.
What is a flashlight?
Flashlight is a fairly simple application at first glance: it lets you add custom search plugins to Yosemite’s built-in Spotlight search. It works similar to the free version of Alfred in many ways , but because it works with Spotlight and not instead, you still get all the benefits of Spotlight search, including incredibly fast results, built-in search functionality, and more. …
However, the essence of Flashlight is its plugins. You can download and install Flashlight in just a couple of clicks, but if you really want to make it useful, you need to find the right plugins and learn how to use them.
You can install new plugins in three ways. You can go to the Flashlight website, find them, and install from there. You can also simply open the Flashlight app to search for approved plugins. If you want, you can also manually install the plugins by dragging and dropping the .BUNDLE file into ~/Library/FlashlightPlugins . You can also easily create your own plugins if you know a little about Python .
You have tons of plugins to choose from, so let’s take a look at some of our favorites.
Shut down, restart, or hibernate your Mac
Shutting down does pretty much what you’d expect. You can enter shutdown, restart, exit, hibernate, lockout, or screen saver in Spotlight to invoke any of these commands. Calling up a menu for these options is not entirely difficult, but it’s nice when they are accessible from the keyboard.
Compose iMessage
iMessage is a plugin that allows you to quickly create iMessage from Spotlight. Just enter “text [person], [your message]”. Make sure you add the comma, otherwise it won’t know where the name ends and the message begins.
Search for a specific emoji or Unicode
Emoji Search and Unicode Search make searching for Unicode or Emoji much easier than in the character menu. Just enter “emoji [query]” or “unicode [query]” and when the result you want appears, press Enter to copy it to your clipboard.
Send Email
Just like the aforementioned iMessage plugin, the Send Email plugin lets you quickly create emails from Spotlight. You can enter “send an email to [name] with [your message]” or “send an email to [email] with the subject [your subject] and [your message]”.
Get a four-day weather forecast
As the name suggests, Weather displays the weather forecast in Spotlight. Just enter “weather [city name]” for a four-day forecast.
Add item to reminders
Reminder makes it easy to add tasks to the Reminders app by simply typing the same as in Reminders. You can enter something like “remind me to go to lunch with Bob at 11:30 on January 11” or simply “remind me to have lunch tomorrow at five.”
Search in Google
Google Search displays Google search results in Spotlight, which is much more convenient than the built-in Spotlight options. Just enter “google [query]” or even just “g [query]” to find what you want. If that’s not enough, you can also install plugins to search Google Maps , Google Images, or Google Translate . Click on any result to open it in your default browser.
Run terminal command
Terminal allows you to run a command in Terminal from Spotlight. Just enter any command you want and Terminal will open and run that command.
Search Lifehacker
I decided to go ahead and make a couple of different plugins for finding articles about Lifehacker. It uses the built-in search engine of our site (though not very good). This one uses a site-specific google search . In both cases, you just need to enter “lifehacker [request]” or “lh [request]”. You will need to manually install these plugins by unzipping and dragging the .BUNDLE file into your ~/Library/FlashlightPlugins directory. Do not install both at the same time, otherwise you will have problems.