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Comment by J3L2404 | Hacker News Reader

Cmd + Space for Spotlight search box is very handy.

I find myself using the Spotlight box for things I wouldn't have guessed...like looking up words in the dictionary, or doing math.

When on a webpage in Safari or in a text document within one of the applications that uses Mac OS X's native "drawing", you can hover over a word and hit Ctrl + Cmd + D to get a quick definition of a word!

Only works for English and Japanese.

Wow, okay, I already use it every day but now I know it does arithmetic as well... thanks!

Besides its capabilities as a launcher, Spotlight is also a very capable calculator. Stuff like sqrt(2pi^e) works, oh, and Cmd+C works for the results, too. Someone was really sweating the details on that one.

> Spotlight is also a very capable calculator

And a pretty nice dictionary and PDF finder.

I believe the sweat was in Calculator.app. 'Opening' Calculator to let Spotlight get something useful from Calculator.

Yup that's the only way I launch anything.

When I Spotlight for "Applications" meaning "the folder with all my applications in it", instead it finds (only) a folder named Applications somewhere deep in the XCode example code with sod all in it.

Any ideas how to get it to do what I want instead of something else? (or at least, also do what I want).

You can at least prevent Spotlight from searching in the XCode folder by manually adding it to the list in System Preferences > Spotlight > Privacy.

I'm still hooked on Launchbar.

I map it to F12 (and dashboard to cmd+F12, as I rarely use it). Physical similarity with the spotlight icon's location, and lets me map cmd+space to changing input methods (ie, switching to 日本語).

I agree, I use this for pretty much everything.

I keep going back and forth between the Google Quick Search and Spotlight as my Cmd + Space shortcut.

Give Alfred a try and have the both of best worlds, I couldn't live without it now.

http://alfredapp.com

too slow, quiksilver or alfred ftw

With SSD it is as fast as quicksilver.

I cannot stress heavily enough how brilliantly fast MacOS is when running off an SSD. I thought windows was peppy when I put an SSD in my desktop. Since putting an SSD in my MBP, MacOS X went from a sluggish annoyance where icons bounced 5-10 times before an app loaded, to a speedy "no time to bounce at all" app start.

I did the same with a first generation MBP (bought in the summer 2006). I replaced the main HD with a Corsair V64, and replaced the optical drive with the old HDD with this kit[1]. The HDD now works in plain old ATA, but it doesn't matter. I use it for mass storage, not for speed.

The results are amazing. It takes:

- 21 seconds from cold boot to login prompt (and 5 more to get a responsive finder),

- 13 seconds to shut down, and

- 22 seconds to wake from deep sleep (2GB of RAM).

As you said, the apps launch almost instantly, including Office 2011 which was incredibly slow from the hard disk.

[1]http://www.mcetech.com/optibay/ ($99). They also provide an external USB case for the DVD drive.

Ifixit offers a similar adapter, cheaper ($60), but without the case. http://www.ifixit.com/Apple-Parts/9-5-mm-Optical-Bay-SATA-Ha...

I agree, but i kept wondering about the lifespan of my apple-samsung ssd, without trim.

It hasnt been slow for several years.

I beg to differ. It's sluggish. Depends what you are used to I guess.

I don't find it even a decent calculator, try doing a division!! It launches the calculator and doesn't even both to pre-fill the question.

It does division fine. Pre-filling would definitely be handy though.

Mine was exceedingly slow when I had >2,000,000 files (gigabytes of versioned source code will do that). Several seconds to pull up an application by name. 10-30 seconds to pull up an infrequently-accessed document by filename. > 1 minute to pull up a PDF by content.

All of which caused a few seconds delay between every result-set returned, during which it was entirely unresponsive. It still worked faster - pressing `enter` would grab the top result when it came up - but that's unacceptably slow.

Quicksilver or something similar is a must. I have become SO much happier with my desktop environments since embracing Quicksilver and Gnome-Do.

ios does it with the search bar in safari, but it'd be nice if spotlight would also let you search the current document, search the web, etc. all with a simple command+spacebar.

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