Hidden Gems: Boolean Spotlight Queries
By know, any decent user of Mac OS X will know and have used Spotlight. Maybe loved, maybe hated it (I’m slowly coming to terms with it). In classic Apple fashion, it’s dead simple to use and needs only a text input field, where you enter whatever comes to mind when you’re looking for that specific thing (or droids). However, with all things that simple, you most often receive a bit too much noise (Google comes to mind).
I recently discovered that Spotlight does accept a bit more complex search terms, one can add boolean operators liek 1 like AND, OR and (heh) NOT.
That alone isn’t that spectacular, but as I was delving into Spotlight’s Framework 2 (some nasty debugging), I learned that some programmers at Apple even went so far as to localize the operators as well! And it does work, Spotlight didn’t care wether I input NOT/NICHT, and AND/UND, or OR/ODER 3, but it only accepts the localized operators when the user language has been set accordingly.
Notes:
TFTS 1: What NOT to do when your server crashes randomly. Compiling transmission fun (FreeBSD)
