I’ve been testing the developer previews of all the new Apple 26 operating systems, which I don’t recommend this early in the cycle, but I like to live dangerously. I’ve quickly become accustomed to Liquid Glass. The iPad windowing enhancements do make it feel more like a real computer, but I usually run things in full-screen mode. My favorite thing to play with so far has been the new Spotlight (what pops up when you press Command + Space) and related shortcuts.
I loved Alfred, I tried Raycast, but a general life goal this year is to simplify wherever I can, so I’ve been exploring the enhancements in the new Spotlight.
What I’ve found the most useful in the past is Alfred’s Open URL Action, which basically lets you type something like “gm united reservation” and it translates that into opening a Gmail search in your browser, with “united reservation” put in the URL in the right place to run a search.
The Shortcuts app in MacOS and iOS is amazing, which I’ve always known, but I haven’t played with it much. This was my chance! After a bit of tinkering, I got it to pop up an input form and then run the search. I Googled a lot to see if it could take input from the Spotlight search bar and every place said no, I’m not sure if this is new in MacOS 26 or not but I found the button that makes it work. It’s not as smooth as Alfred, but it’s pretty decent. I’m going to share a screenshot that shows my Gmail search shortcut that takes input from Spotlight — the key breakthrough was clicking the (i) menu on the right and finding the checkbox for “Receive Input from Search.”
I gave it a “gm” hotkey, pressed enter, and you get this in Spotlight.
Tada! Not as nice as Alfred but it gets the job done. My other shortcuts that people might find useful are LI for LinkedIn search, PY is Perplexity, YT for searching the history of YouTube videos I’ve watched, and AM for searching my Amazon order history. (Because I’m usually trying to find a link for something I’m recommending, or re-order an item.) Here are the search URLs for everything I’ve mentioned:
- https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#search/ (If you have multiple Google accounts, change the number in the URL to go to the one you want, and then login in that same order every time.)
- https://www.linkedin.com/search/results/index/?keywords=
- https://www.perplexity.ai/search/
- https://www.youtube.com/feed/history?query=
- https://www.amazon.com/your-orders/search/?search=
If you dug this, did you know WordPress also has a cool popup shortcut feature? In 2023, we introduced the Command Palette in the Gutenberg block editor and site editor. To access it on Mac, you press Command + k. I’d like to bring it to every admin page so it can function more like Spotlight or Raycast for WordPress.
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