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Prior to MacOS Tahoe, Spotlight was a search tool. You could call it up with the Cmd+Space keyboard shortcut, type whatever it was you were looking for, and there it was. Before Tahoe was released, I was using a tool called Alfred because it was more like the tools I'd been accustomed to, and the previous version of Spotlight couldn't hold a candle to those apps.

That was then, but Spotlight in the here and now is a very different beast. Since the upgrade to Tahoe, Spotlight has fallen in line with what are usually called keyboard launchers.

I've been using keyboard launchers on the Linux desktop for some time, and I find them an invaluable means of making my work far more efficient. You see, keyboard launchers are much, much more than desktop search tools, although they do that as well.