Searching and the app grid

Opening Lightspot

Press ⌘Space, or the shortcut you picked in the menu bar (⌘⇧Space or ⌥Space). Press it again, press Esc or click anywhere outside to hide it. You can also choose Show Lightspot from the menu bar icon, or open Lightspot from Finder or Launchpad while it is running. If another app already owns the shortcut, Lightspot tells you at launch; see When ⌘Space is taken.

The panel opens on the screen that has the mouse pointer, centred horizontally and near the top. It is a search capsule with a results area below it, drawn with the same translucent glass as Spotlight. You can drag it by its background.

The app grid

With nothing typed, the field says Applications and Lightspot shows a grid of apps, seven per row. The first row holds seven recent apps: the ones you last opened through Lightspot, then apps that are running, then the rest alphabetically. Below it, every app is listed under its category.

The tabs across the top filter the grid to one category: Productivity & Finance, Utilities, Entertainment, Social, Creativity, Developer Tools, Information & Reading and Other. Press Tab and ⇧Tab to step through them, or click one; clicking the selected tab again shows all apps.

The category comes from the category the app declares in its Info.plist (LSApplicationCategoryType). Apps that declare none are placed by keywords in their name and bundle identifier, and anything left over goes to Other. Use the arrow keys to move through the grid and ↵ to open the selected app.

Lightspot finds apps in these folders, up to three levels deep:

• /Applications and ~/Applications
• /System/Applications and /System/Applications/Utilities
• /System/Library/CoreServices/Applications

It rescans them when you open the panel and the last scan is more than a minute old, so a newly installed app shows up the next time you open Lightspot after that.

Results

As soon as you type, the grid is replaced by results. Lightspot does not wait for you to stop typing: the whole search runs again on every keystroke. Results are grouped into sections that always appear in this order:

Each section shows at most four results, except Terminal History and Browser, which show up to six. Calculator and developer-tool results lead because they only appear when your text actually parses as math or as a tool command, so when they appear they are almost always what you want.

The little label in the search field says what ↵ will do with the selected result: Open, Copy, Run, Search, Terminate, or, for a project, Open ↵ · Terminal ⌘↵ · Finder ⌥↵. When an app matches, the icon of the best-matching app appears next to the label.

If nothing matches at all, Lightspot still offers to search the web for your text.

How text is matched

Matching ignores case. Every candidate gets a score from the first rule it passes, with the highest scores first:

Many sections also match keywords (System Settings panes and quick actions have synonyms, so wifi, wlan and ssid all find Wi-Fi), and some ignore weak matches: Terminal History, Recent Projects and Browser need at least a substring match.

Top Hit

The highest-scoring result becomes the Top Hit, as long as it scores 60 or more, and moves out of its own section. A few kinds of results are treated differently:

• Calculator results are never the Top Hit; they have their own card at the top instead.
• Web search only becomes the Top Hit for a search prefix such as gh react or for an address such as localhost:3000.
• A Terminal History command becomes the Top Hit only if it is pinned or you picked it before for the same text, so typing git does not suddenly run a random git command.

Lightspot learns from your choices

Every time you open a result, Lightspot remembers what you typed and what you picked. Next time, that result gets a bonus of up to 50 points on top of its match score:

• Same text: +20 if you typed exactly this before and picked it; if what you typed so far is the start of what you typed then, up to +10.
• Recency: up to +15, halving after two days, a third after four days, and so on.
• Frequency: grows with how often you picked it (3.5 for once, 7 for three times, 10.5 for seven times), up to +15.

The bonus applies to everything except calculator results, developer tools and web search, whose answers depend only on what you typed, and clipboard entries and kill actions, which Lightspot does not record.

Search history

Press ⌘Y or ⌘⇧H, or choose Search History… in the menu, to see what you picked and when. Each row shows the result, the text you typed in quotes, how long ago and how many times.

Use the arrow keys and ↵ to open an entry again, ⌫ to delete the selected entry, or the buttons on each row. Clear All (or Clear Search History in the menu) wipes the list and resets everything Lightspot learned. Deleting one row removes it from the list but keeps its ranking bonus. Lightspot keeps the 200 most recent entries and statistics for up to 500 results.

Not everything is remembered. Clipboard entries, calculator answers, developer tools and kill actions are never recorded, and results that only copy text, such as snippets, count towards ranking without appearing in the list. See what Lightspot stores.

Keyboard shortcuts

The ⋯ button at the right end of the search field opens the same menu as the menu bar icon, plus a few panel-only items; see Menu bar and settings.

Typing with an input method

Lightspot searches while an input method is still composing a word (the underlined text of Japanese, Chinese or Korean input, or a Vietnamese input method such as JOKey), instead of waiting for each word to be committed.

What Lightspot does not search

Lightspot has no file index, so it does not find documents, photos, mail or messages by name or content. The full list of what it reads is on the privacy page.