In an article on MacWorld from 2015, I saw the following image about changing the order in which items appear in Spotlight:
When I saw this, I wanted to change the order items appear on my Mac. 80% of my Spotlight use consists of looking up a definition in a dictionary. Currently I almost always have to scroll down to view the definition result, so I would like the dictionary to always show as the first category.
But on my Mac (macOS Catalina 10.15.6), the Spotlight window looks like this (it is Dutch) and I can't find anything about changing the order.
Is there any other way to change the order of my Spotlight items? I currently still use Catalina, but perhaps on Big Sur? And does anyone know if this can be changed on iOS too?
Many thanks in advance!
42 Answers
I found out after that Apple removed this feature from El Capitan. See this question.
After a bit of additional searching, I found that hitting Cmd+L brings you straight to the dictionary definitions. There's an other solution which means recording items in a plist file, but as I'm no fan of directly 'modifying' the OS, I decided to stick with the Cmd+L solution.
Thanks to Tetsujin for checking this on multiple older Macs!
8Yeah as others have said, it has been taken away. Classic Apple being we know better :(
I sometimes use spotlight for dictionary too and usually the dictionary results are buried down below. One little trick I find useful is doing cmd + down arrow key to skip categories and go down faster.
