Everything You Can Do With Spotlight Search in MacOS Tahoe
The software is currently only available to developers in beta (with a public beta coming soon), but Apple has already shown off several major features coming this year with macOS Tahoe 26. Perhaps the most exciting of all, Liquid Glass redesign aside, is the Spotlight update.
With macOS 26, Spotlight will be more than just a search tool: it will also be able to launch apps and actions in those apps, as well as access the contents of the clipboard. It also gets full integration with Shortcuts, so any automation you set up can be run through Spotlight.
Apple calls this the “biggest update” to Spotlight, with “smartly” ranked results, support for third-party cloud drives, and an overview view that helps you see what’s on your system even if you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for. App developers will also be able to support actions through Spotlight, though it may take a while before your favorite apps add the feature.
Even with all these changes, Spotlight can be launched in the same ways as before: via the magnifying glass icon in the menu bar (top right) or the keyboard shortcuts Cmd+Space or F4 . The first few times you open the search bar, you’ll see instructions on how to use it, and after that, you’ll see bubbles on the right representing apps, files, keyboard shortcuts, and the macOS clipboard.
Click on any of these shortcuts to start browsing the items in that category, with a sorting system that Apple says gets more personalized over time. Select the Files icon (the folder symbol), for example, to see the latest files on your Mac. You can also switch between these four different views by holding down the Cmd button and pressing 1 (Apps), 2 (Files), 3 (Shortcuts), or 4 (Clipboard).
Open the shortcuts drop-down list and you’ll get a few suggestions for actions you can perform, like Send Message , Start Timer , or Create Note . To the right of these shortcuts, there’s an Add Shortcuts button so you can get to them faster. Scroll down the list and you’ll see that there are a number of options, even before adding third-party apps, covering everything from maps to music.
The new Spotlight view isn’t just for starting tasks, it’s for completing them, too. Select Send a message , for example, and you can write your message and select a recipient for it in the Spotlight window—just click in the fields to enter the information, then press Enter to confirm.
Other ways to use this are to set timers for specific periods of time and to add new text to an existing note. All of this works without you having to lift your fingers from the keyboard, and you don’t have to switch to the relevant app (for example, emails can be sent in the background using Spotlight).
Depending on the mode Spotlight is in, you can access additional options by clicking the three dots in the upper-right corner of the window. In the case of the clipboard, for example, you can clear the clipboard history. When it comes to files and apps, you get some options regarding how items are displayed on the screen.
As you type what you’re looking for, you’ll see Spotlight begin making suggestions in the pane below, not just for results you might be interested in, but also for filters you might want to use. You can also type “/” (backslash) followed by a filter, so “/icloud drive” would limit your results to iCloud Drive folders. As before, you can also perform simple calculations and currency conversions in the Spotlight window.
Overall, this is a more comprehensive and more customizable Spotlight, and there’s no doubt more to come as Apple continues to develop the feature, even if it was at least partly inspired by third-party apps that already did the same things.