The new Spotlight for macOS 26 shows a path forward
Note: This story has not been updated for several years.
On Thursday there was a Six Colors Zoom call for Backstage-level members and contributors alike. Glenn Fleishman asked Jason Snell and Dan Moren about Spotlight. He wondered about the discoverability and the intuitiveness of some of these features. Jason mentioned that Apple views the features as power user features that don’t get in the way if you don’t know what they are. Dan said it would still be nice to have documentation of what all the features were, because it was difficult to know exactly what all the command functions are otherwise.
I piped in with my view that the real missing piece is natural language processing so people aren’t trying to discover commands or read documentation. We still need those other things, but to make this truly accessible we can’t expect everyone to memorize all the Quick Keys.
In March I wrote an opinion piece for Six Colors lamenting how text-to-Siri pales in comparison to typing a web search into your browser. I also compared text-to-Siri to Spotlight which handles searching better, but can’t process natural language requests. What I wrote in March is much broader in scope and encompasses requests like product knowledge.
Apple still isn’t doing any of that right now, but with App Intents and Quick Keys in Spotlight it’s creating the explicit command syntax that could be fed by something interpreting a natural language request.
Think of it like this: this year they’re writing grep, sed, pine, ffmpeg, etc. for Spotlight. A common issue for people is not knowing how to structure commands and turning to the web, and LLMs, to copy and paste arguments and flags for those powerful tools. They’re more accessible when people don’t have to figure out the flags and arguments themselves, but the explicit commands you pass them are still the foundation for what’s doing the actual file operations.
Jason said on the call that he thinks that this missing puzzle piece might be as early as next year, and that it seems like the next logical step. It certainly seems more achievable with a foundation like this laid.
Hopefully bozos like me aren’t writing blog posts in two years asking where it is while we ask LLMs to compose our Spotlight queries for us. I’m thinking positive thoughts, though.
[Joe Rosensteel is a VFX artist and writer based in Los Angeles.]
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