MacOS 26 "Tahoe" Applications Menu
Apple recently released the newest version of MacOS, "Tahoe", with their latest UI revolution: "liquid glass".
And it's going great! Everyone just loves it. /s
One of the less exciting changes is the replacement of the dedicated applications menu, activated from the "show apps" button on the dock, with the Spotlight search function in an applications-only filter mode. The UI is no longer fullscreen, but seeing as it is Spotlight, MacOS's dedicated search function, the search bar is front and center.
And that's fine. I don't mind a keyboard-driven UI. There's just one problem...
As you can see in the above video, typing anything produces no results. After thinking about this for a bit, I decided to check the Spotlight settings, something I don't recall ever doing before. I'm not what you'd call a frequent Spotlight user.
I've highlighted the option "apps" in the "results from system" section of Spotlight's options in the above screenshot. That setting was toggled off. It must be toggled on.
I don't recall ever changing this option before. As I mentioned, I'm not a frequent Spotlight user. You would think Apple would make sure this was toggled on during the upgrade process to make sure their replacement for the old applications menu was guaranteed to work as expected. I'm not generally a fan of upgrades changing users' preferences, but now that Spotlight is the officially blessed way to launch applications, I can't think of a reason the user would want to prevent Spotlight from building that index. It would be appropriate to deprecate that option and always index installed applications' names.