Spotlight no longer shows the path?

thanks for the easy find tip.

glad to find I am not alone in being disappointed at yet another crippling of a fundamental feature, in this case the use of the spotlight search and find tool from being able to find anything actually useful, like named files. As it stands I now cannot use it, it's impractical, clumsy and slow instead of easy and fast - and yes, search filenenames not contents.

Likewise the now crippled "Spaces", I have to use a paid for app, from the above it seems I now have to use another app to do what spotlight should.

It seems to me that the designers are completely out of touch with the people who use the equipment to make a living - or yes, maybe just youngsters playing mobile app games.

I can accept the os not doing things it has never done, that is what progress is for, but to actually take away fundamental ease of use "pc killer" elements I find too perplexing. To claim they are enhancements in some way defies understanding. Another example is they removed FTP access. (yes it is under the hood but that requires tech moves).

So, I suppose I am hoping someone will come along and say , "it's ok, relax, all these are still available and can be re-activated *here* ", these features are not dead but merely were sleeping.

I still have my ppc laptop so there is relief there.

thanks for the key strokes heads up - presumably the designer does not have arthritic fingers.

One lives in hope.

Anthony

Ha, I would not hold breath waiting for finder / spotlight improvements. These days I do everything that I can on an Android device, and love it. When I go back to my iMac or MBP it feels like a drag. Apple can learn a lot from an OS without a visable file system at all! If OSX can "mature" into something more like Android, yet still remain as fast and powerful, I'm all for that... go Apple go.

I still have my ppc laptop so there is relief there.

One lives in hope.

Anthony

Thank you so much - wish I had know long ago!

ragnu wrote:

Just press and hold down alt + cmd. You'll see the path below the popup.

This is not at all "just". I realize this is an old thread and you were tryingto be helpful (which you were, thanks), but even in Mountain Lion, there's still no better solution and this workaround is clumsy and slow, adding steps, and not at all "just do this". "Just do ..." would be "Just use Spotlight." Period. Everything you need right there, without extra multi-key presses or waiting for delays. This is of course not your fault, ragnu, but Apple's.

I can't believe they take such useful and unobtrusive functionality away and (I assume) call it an "improvement". I just upgraded downgraded to Mountain Lion after holding out on 10.6.8 for a long time and spent all day fixing annoying things like this (e.g. can't reassign that stupid Launchpad key without losing other functions ... anyone?). It really does begin to feel like a dumbed-down downgrade. 10.6.8 worked fine for me and so far, I haven't found much use for any of the new ML features (No, I don't want to integrate everything with Facebook!) but plenty of annoyances. Searched all around, but there's still no way to enable showing paths in Spotlight by default. I hope somebody proves me wrong.

I agree, and guess what, if the document preview is not wide enough, the full path does not show!

All I ever used spotlight for was finding files, now it is next to useless.

Well, if you use Cmd-I while hovering over an item in the Spotlight list you'll get the Get Info pop-up which shows the entire path. And faster than alt/option-cmd but not as nice as it used to be with the hint boxes (or whatever they were called).

It seem that you have solved the problem, but this is the way I found the path of the item "found" by spotlight.

I was used to seeing the path when you hovered the cursor over the result, but for some reason now that has gone.

After trial and error I open spotlight and search for the item I am looking for. When I have it I hover over it and the item appears to the left of the results, but no path.

Immediately hold down the option and control keys on the keyboard and the status bar appears on the bottom of the image of the item to the left with the path described on it.

I notice you call it "alt-command" and do not mention the "Status bar". On my Mac the word Option is large and the word "alt" is on the same key, but quite small. Of course, the status bar is the bar that runs across the bottom of a window.

Anyway folks, have a good day!

just highlight the file on spotlight and then press cmd+I to get info window

For those of us using a Mac, press option+command (not alt+command.)

No more path shown in spotlight. Yet another disappointment with Lion. I guess up there they don't understand that one doesn't necessarily just look for a file to see what's in it, but one may also want to *quickly* find *where* it is. Sigh.

My sentiments exactly!

Highlight the item and hit Command + R and it will take you to the file's location in finder