How to Power Up OS X's Spotlight with Flashlight

When we first talked aboutFlashlight, it was still in beta.

Even then, it was a promising way to enhance Spotlight in OS X Yosemite with more search results.

Now, the app’s much more mature and with a bunch of plugins, it’s incredibly powerful.

Let’s take a look at how to set it up and find some of the most useful plugins.

What Is Flashlight?

However, the crux of Flashlight is its plugins.

you might install new plugins in three different ways.

you’re able to go to the Flashlight site andsearch them outand install them from there.

you’re free to also just open up the Flashlight app to search through the approved plugins.

If you want, you’re free to also manually install plugins by dragging the .BUNDLE file into~/Library/FlashlightPlugins.

you’ve got the option to also easilymake your own plugins if you know a bit about Python.

Shutdowndoes pretty much what you’d expect.

iMessageis a plugin that allows you to quickly compose an iMessage from Spotlight.

Just throw in in “text [person], [your message]”.

As the name suggests,Weatherdisplays the weather forecast in Spotlight.

Just throw in in “weather [city name]” to get the four day forecast.

hit any result to open it in your default web client.

Terminalallows you to run a command in Terminal from Spotlight.

Just key in in whatever command you want and Terminal will open up and run that command.

You’ll need to manually install these plugins by unzipping and dragging the .BUNDLE file into your~/Library/FlashlightPluginsdirectory.

Don’t install both at the same time, otherwise you’ll have some problems.