Wednesday, July 22, 2015

Flashlight Brightens Up Spotlight in Yosemite

Josh Centers:

Developer Nate Parrot has created Flashlight, an open platform that makes it possible for developers to expand Spotlight’s repertoire of commands. The free Flashlight app helps you find, install, and manage the necessary plugins.

[…]

Here are some examples:

  • Perform a quick Web search by inserting / before a Spotlight query.
  • Search Google Maps by prefixing your query with “google maps” or just “gm”.
  • Eject a mounted volume. You can also eject all mounted volumes by typing “eject all”.

[…]

You can install any of hundreds of plugins. The Flashlight app offers browsable categories including Design, Developer, Language, Media, and System, or you can search through the full set.

Looks like it works via SIMBL-style code injection, so I’m not sure how long it will last.

Update (2015-09-03): Nate Parrott (via Phil Dokas):

Hacking Spotlight is impossible in 10.11.

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The latest update of Yosemite, 10.10.4, caused this to stop working https://github.com/nate-parrott/Flashlight/issues/494

The developer is actually interning at Apple so isn’t working on it for now.

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