Best Launcher apps for Mac: Why we use launchers? Because they’re faster and more powerful than any built-in search system. If you’ve never used an app launcher try once. The spotlight is optimized for launching apps. Rather than Spotlight in Mac, we have a number of apps to launch apps easily. Here is the list of Best Mac launchers.
Activate Spotlight for Searching - To bring up a handy search interface that will let you find files on your Mac, just use Command + Space. Spotlight can do all kinds of things, from locating.
Just moved to the Mac. Having used Copernic, Spotlight is so frustrating and limiting. What's the best alternative that's most similar to Copernic? (Tried Google desktop on windows, but went back to Copernic.) Thanks.
Mac yosemite introduced new spotlight, it is an productivity feature available in Mac OS. But there are always some Linux users who bring new stuff to Linux and make it better than any other OS. Here comes Mutate alternative to OS-X spotlight created by Wei Qiang, it offers pretty much same features like Spotlight or maybe better than Spotlight.
If you are using a Mac but prefer Windows 10’s appearance, these handy apps and tips will shake things up and make your Mac look and feel like a Windows PC. ActiveDock is a good alternative.
Although I still haven’t found a perfect Spotlight interface or alternative, with utilities such as NotLight, EasyFind, and MoRU out there, Mac OS X users have plenty of quality searching options.
What is an app launcher for Mac?
App launcher job is to open installed apps using a shortcut. For example, On your Mac, you have many apps installed. To open a particular app you don’t need to open Application folder every time. An app launcher will simply open your desired app with few clicks.
Apple already installed (from 10.4 Tiger) Spotlight feature for application launching and searching. However, we have great Spotlight alternative apps which have more features than the traditional app.
With a simplicity of mindset, developers are developed many launcher apps for Mac. Now the latest launcher apps offering more functionality options like instant search, application launching, news, Wikipedia search and much more. These are worth to try for every Mac user.
1. Alfred
Alfred for Mac is an app designed to make it easier to locate files and applications and launch them faster. It is also a search tool, allowing you to search through files and their metadata. Anyone can easily increase productivity by launching apps with shortcuts, Instant access to web searches, bookmarks, browse and play music from your iTunes library quickly and perform actions – copy, move & email files & folders.
Installation of the Alfred follows traditional app installation on the Mac. After installation, it starts working on the Mac menu bar. To start using it you can set the keyboard shortcut in the app Preferences.
Here are some basic hotkeys for Alfred.
⌥space Show Alfred
↓ Select the next result in the list
↑ Select the previous item in the list
↩ Action the currently selected item
⌘# Action the # item directly [1-9]
⌘o Open file or application in the default application
⌘, Show the Preferences Window
⌥↩ Search the currently typed query in Spotlight
⌃↩ Search the currently typed query in default web search
⌘↩ Reveal in Finder (if the result is a local file)
preferences Show Alfred Preferences
google, wiki, imdb, duck … For custom web search keywords
Alfred is our first and best alternative to the Spotlight.
Quicksilver is a fantastic alternative to the Spotlight. This app indexes your entire Mac apps, files and instantly opens when you search for a file. Quicksilver gives you quick access to all your important things. With only a few keystrokes, you can get to your applications, files, contacts, bookmarks, music, etc. This app offers a simple and powerful app for anyone looking for alternative ways to launch applications from the Dock or to hunt through the Finder for files.
3. Launchy
Launchy is a free cross-platform utility designed to help you forget about your start menu, the icons on your desktop, and even your file manager. The Launchy is available for both Mac and Windows.
Overflow is an application designed to quickly launch applications, open documents, or access folders while reducing the number of items needed in your Dock. For example, any item you see in the Finder can be added to the Overflow interface, making it accessible through a few simple mouse clicks or keystrokes.
Conclusion
Overall, we find Alfred is a great launcher app for Mac. This app has everything, to begin with. If you not satisfied with Alfred work, you can try the remaining launcher apps for faster Mac operation.
Spotlight is very useful for searching on a Mac, but it has some limitations. There are several third-party applications which provide additional features and alternative interfaces for finding items by name and searching file contents.
Spotlight App Mac
Here we focus on our favorite FREE Mac search app: EasyFind. Office 365 keyboard shortcuts mac. We’ve listed links to a few other options at the end.
EasyFind is developed by DEVONtechnologies, LLC and can be downloaded from their site or from the Apple App Store.
Some of EasyFind’s advantages:
EasyFind does a “brute force” search, so it works for ANY available folder or drive.
As a result, it consistently finds items in local data—on all directly-attached internal and external drives—AND items on all connected servers and other network-attached drives.
Spotlight only returns search results from drives which your computer has already “indexed”. Pre-indexing drives makes Spotlight very fast and efficient, but some drives may not be indexed and thus return no search results at all. Network volumes are less likely to be completely indexed, and some cannot be indexed at all.
In Spotlight you normally can only search “This Mac” or the active Finder window. EasyFind provides many more “where to search” options. As shown on the right side of the illustration below, you can choose from a comprehensive list of locations. From top to bottom, these include:
Select: It will prompt you to navigate to a drive or folder to search
Active (frontmost) window in the Finder
Multiple volumes at once! You can choose to search ALL local and network volumes together, or local volumes, or only removable ones—e.g. flash drives and CDs/DVDs.
Choose any drive: In this example the startup drive—”Macintosh HD”—is the only drive available. But if any other internal, external, removable, or network drives were connected, they will appear in that section as well.
The “main-level” folders in your startup drive: Applications, Library, System, and Users, along with any other folders that might have been added at that level.
All folders in your “home” directory: Desktop, Documents, Downloads, etc.
Finally, once you begin to use EasyFind, an additional section of recently-accessed folders or drives is added at the bottom.
Spotlight does provide a lot of options for searching, but many of them are hidden, obscure, or only pop-up momentarily while you type into a search box. WIth EasyFind, various options are more consistently and clearly spelled out in the window.
Just type the word(s)—or any string of text/characters to seach for—in the search field along the top of the window, and choose from the options, as shown on the left side of the example window below:
Search for: The first three options are for searching files and/and folders by NAME. The last option is for searching the contents inside of files.
Operator: As you would expect, if you type more than one search term, “All Words” is an AND operator, “Any Word” is like an OR operator, and “Phrase” searches for all of the text—any combination of characters including spaces—exactly as typed.
Comparison and Include: Normally—unless you are doing system admin or development work—you’ll want to keep “Ignore case” checked, and the other items NOT checked. For details on these options, the “Unix-Wildcards” operators, and other features, go to the “Help” menu and select “EasyFind Help”. Then choose “How to Use” or ”Usage”. EXCEPTION: Typically the files you normally access are not in invisible folders. But in some cases an application might use temporary or cache folders which are hidden. So if you are searching for such a file—an email attachment or recovered file, for example—and can’t find it anywhere, try temporarily enabling the “Invisible” option.
Another very powerful feature: As you can see from the search results in this example, EasyFind shows the full PATH for all “found” items in a list view, so you have a perspective on where everything is. This makes it easier to compare/resolve duplicates, etc. Of course you can click on the column headers to sort by Name, Date Created or Modified, Size, Kind, and “Where” (Path).
Finally, you can check out the shortcuts along the top of the window: Reveal in Finder, Quick Look, Share options, etc. And as you’d expect, there are plenty of keyboard shortcuts: You can see those by exploring the various menus.
Spotlight is tremendously useful, but as you can see EasyFind provides a nice alternative for many tasks.
Other Alternatives to Spotlight
There are several other alternatives to Spotlight which offer interesting features for finding items in Mac OS X. Some of these also provide alternative interfaces to Spotlight’s index:
Tembo and HoudahSpot (free trials for both; $15 and $29 respectively) http://www.houdah.com/tembo/ http://www.houdah.com/houdahSpot/
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Mac Spotlight Alternative
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