Faster Spotlight search using, you guessed it, TextExpander

TextExpander is like this magical, delicious, calorie-free gravy that can be ladled liberally on almost any textual workflow. “Magical” because, unlike the stuff that tops turkey, TextExpander makes things even leaner than before. As a follow-up to my post on Spotlight search tricks, I wanted to tell you about a really simple TextExpander snippet that I’m using to fetch PDFs super fast.1

When I type kpdf, it expands to:

name: kind:pdf

It also puts the cursor right after name:. No matter where I am on my Mac, I can

1. Option-Space to open Spotlight
2. Type kpdf
3. Type part of the PDF’s name

It’s as if all of my PDF files are magically in a single folder. So fast.

If you find yourself doing the same kind of Spotlight searches over and over, I strongly recommend using TextExpander to take care of that recurring text for you.