Blog
Notes from the launcher
Product updates, deep dives into keyboard-first workflows, and the occasional rant about Spotlight. Written by the CmdSpace team.
macOS Tahoe 26 Spotlight vs CmdSpace: what the new command palette gets right and wrong
For the first time in roughly a decade, Spotlight feels like Apple actually opened it up and rewrote it. macOS Tahoe 26 ships a real command-palette UI — tabs for Apps, Files, Actions, and Clipboard reachable via Cmd+1, Cmd+2, Cmd+3, Cmd+4…
Spotlight vs Finder search on macOS: when to use which (and when neither works)
Most macOS users think of Spotlight and Finder search as the same thing wearing two different hats. They are not. They share a backend — both lean on the mds daemon and the on-disk metadata index — but the way each surfaces results is genu…
Spotlight Search privacy in 2026: what Apple sends, and what stays local
Spotlight is one of the most-used features on macOS and one of the least-examined. Most users type ⌘Space dozens of times a day and never read a privacy disclosure. The mechanics are not secret — Apple has documentation for most of it — bu…
Spotlight on macOS Tahoe can't find your files? Six fixes that actually work
You type a filename you know is on disk. Spotlight returns nothing — or worse, it returns the file's parent folder but not the file itself. On macOS Tahoe 26 this has become common enough that the TidBits forum keeps a running thread about…
mdworker eating your CPU on macOS? Here's what to do in 2026
If your fans suddenly sound like a jet engine and Activity Monitor shows a process named mdworkershared or mdsstores near the top, you have already met Spotlight's indexer. On a healthy machine the indexer should be invisible — it runs in…
Why Spotlight keeps reindexing after every macOS update (and how to stop it)
You install a .x.0 release on Sunday night. Monday morning your Mac is warm, the fan is on, and Activity Monitor shows mdsstores near the top of the CPU list. Tuesday it is still there. The internet says "this is normal after an update", a…
Is Spotlight wearing down your SSD? Evidence from Sequoia and Tahoe
If you owned a Mac on macOS Sequoia in 2024 and watched the "Bytes Written" line in Disk Utility climb hundreds of gigabytes a day with the lid closed, you were not imagining it. Spotlight's indexer briefly turned into one of the largest s…
Why Spotlight is hostile to developers (and what to replace it with)
Spotlight was designed to find your photos, your Mail messages, and the occasional Numbers spreadsheet. It was not designed to coexist with a developer's home directory. After ten years of yearly macOS updates, that design mismatch has har…
Rebuild the Spotlight index in 2026: the only guide you need
A Spotlight rebuild is the macOS equivalent of "have you tried turning it off and on again?" — boring, slightly slow, and effective often enough to be the first real fix to try when search results stop matching reality. This guide is the l…
How to migrate from Spotlight to CmdSpace on macOS Tahoe
Spotlight on macOS Tahoe 26 looks better than ever. It also breaks more than ever. If you have ever watched mdworkershared pin a CPU core for an afternoon, or asked Spotlight for a file you know is on disk and gotten a blank result page, y…
macOS Spotlight tips and tricks that still work in Tahoe 26
Spotlight has more capability than most users discover. Apple ships features into Spotlight every year, retires others quietly, and rarely documents the differences. By 2026, the result is a search bar where half the useful tricks are folk…
Inline calculator on macOS: every option from Spotlight to CmdSpace
Every macOS user needs an inline calculator. Quick math, unit conversion, currency conversion, percentage of a number — the question is not whether you want one but which surface is fastest. There are at least six credible options on macOS…