One of the features I like the most about OS X 10.5 is Spotlight — yes , come from me , that might seem unusual , but Apple has handle nearly every issue I had with Spotlight in Tiger . In particular , I ’m thrilled that you’re able to search for musical phrase within documents , and employ boolean operators ( such as AND , OR , and NOT ) to further restrict your search results .

you’re able to use booleans by typing them in , of course , but if you ’re more visual by nature , you’re able to also apply the Finder ’s hunt windowpane to do boolean search without ever type AND or OR . The enigma ? A secret feature in the Finder ’s hunt window . By fashion of example , moot this hypothetic lookup : I ’d like to incur anything in my Macworld weblogs brochure that contained the word Terminal , and the word Safari or the phrase defaults write . If I wanted to type it out , that query would wait like this in Spotlight - speak :

If I type that into the public eye search box with my Macworld weblogs folder choose , Spotlight will find oneself 41 compeer . Now here ’s the secret to work up that same query without having to type it all out . begin a hunt as common in the Finder ; in this case , I ’d do that by typing Terminal in the hunt field of operations , and then opt my Macworld weblogs folder as the search location . After the initial results appear , click the plus sign to add another criterion … and then it ’s time for the legerdemain .

The first tally standard will be Kind is Any , and I ’ll just depart that as is . But instead of just clicking the plus sign to add together another criterion , the secret to more powerful Finder searches is to moderate the Option keystone down . After you have one criterion in position ( Kind is Any , in this case ) , the Option key will commute the plus sign into an ellipsis ( … ) . Click that while holding the Option tonality , and you ’ll get a new conditional section . you’re able to set the conditional for Any ( OR ) , All ( AND ) , or None ( NOT ) . Just enter the term you ’d like to search on in the conditional section , and you ’ll see the results in real metre .

Since this is harder to explain than it is to do , here ’s a movie showing the edifice of the above query :

As you may see , I just had to insert Contents lookup for both Safari and “ defaults write ” to get hold the same 41 mate that I found with the search text edition above . But using the visual guide has advantage , as you may see in the telecasting — by just changing Any to All in the pop - up carte du jour , I can also see how many files I have that bear Terminal and both Safari and “ defaults pen ” ( four document ) . If I change over it to None , I find that there are 86 documents that contain Terminal but do n’t contain either Safari or “ defaults write ” .

This Option - snap trick adds a sight of mightiness to your Finder search ; just remember you’re able to only Option - snap after you have at least one criterion already created for your hunting .