I’m switching back from Spotlight, at least for now

Spotlight will let you assign text shortcuts, but only to Actions.

As a part of the process of reviewing macOS Tahoe, I stopped using my longtime launcher LaunchBar and forced myself to use Apple’s new and improved version of Spotlight.

The surprising thing is, I never went back to LaunchBar. Spotlight in Tahoe was responsive, well integrated, and finally supplied me with the OS-native clipboard history feature I’ve wanted for years. While there were a few features from LaunchBar I missed—most notably, the ability to bring up an app in the launcher window and then drag a file onto it from the Finder—I was able to adapt quickly.

My friend Dr. Drang gave Spotlight in Tahoe a go recently and had a much worse experience, most notably reporting that it was terribly slow. He quickly retreated to LaunchBar (and, for clipboard history, Keyboard Maestro).

I have to agree with Dr. Drang here: I don’t know when, and I don’t know why, but over the last few months, as macOS Tahoe has gone from 26.3 to 26.4 to 26.5 beta, Spotlight has gotten progressively worse. It’s sometimes incredibly slow, making me wait to launch an app. Sometimes it misses entire categories of items. (I frequently launch items saved in my Safari favorites, and on several occasions, Spotlight just refused to show any of them.)

Also, my months of using Spotlight revealed another weakness: It’s just not as good as LaunchBar is at intuiting which items are more important to me. In Spotlight, if I type home and accidentally select an app like HomeControl or HomeBot instead of the regular old Home app, I am then prompted to launch that other app, seemingly forever. In LaunchBar, not only does it seem to recognize that the app I’ve launched hundreds of times is more likely to be my choice than the app I’ve launched once or twice, but LaunchBar will also let the user define a text shortcut that is hardwired to a particular item.

Spotlight in Tahoe will let you define text shortcuts, which it calls “Quick Keys”—but only for Actions, one particular class of item. Why that functionality isn’t available for all items is completely beyond me. But the result is that I end up launching the wrong thing, and I have no real recourse except to try to remember to launch the right thing again and again until it figures it out.

(A sad admission: On several occasions, I have renamed bookmarks and even deleted some installed apps just to stop Spotlight from recommending the wrong thing.)

In any event, Dr. Drang reminded me that there’s an easy solution to my quibbles about Spotlight: Just go back to LaunchBar.

One reason I had been willing to stop using LaunchBar was that it had been increasingly unstable for me, indexing files slowly after startup, failing to find recent changes, and throwing indexing errors. It also hadn’t been updated very much recently, making me wonder if the developer was more interested in its app Little Snitch and had put LaunchBar in maintenance mode. Fortunately, there was a substantial update in March, so maybe there’s life left in the ol’ girl after all.

So, for now, my dalliance with Spotlight is over, and I’ve returned to the familiar floating launcher window of LaunchBar. However, I’m going to keep an eye on Spotlight. If Apple can make it faster, more reliable, and a bit more customizable in macOS 27, it might be on to something.