MacOS – No Filter in Pixelmator

The only way I could get this to work is by creating a new service that looks up the word and than tells Dictionary.app to use the "all" filter.

1. Open /Applications/Automator.app and select the services template
2. in the top right part of the screen, you should see that the default input parameters Automator has selected ("Service receives selected text in any application") is just what you want
3. in the left hand search field, search for an Action called "Run Applescript" and drag it into your workflow

4. replace the part "(* Your script goes here *)" with the following Applescript, and than choose File->Save. Automator will ask you for a name for your new service (eg. "lookup in all dictionaries" and from that moment on, your service will be available in all applications.

   set dictLocation to "dict:///" & input
   open location dictLocation
    tell application "System Events" to tell process "Dictionary" to keystroke "0"    using command down
   

5. (optional) You might also want to define a shortcut for you new service by going into "System Preferences">"Keyboard">"Keyboard Shortcuts">"Services", finding your Service in the list of Services, and double-clicking the whitespace next to it do define a global shortcut.

It turns out that the problem was that I had the Finder window list set to sort by the Kind column. Spotlight apparently does not like that arrangement, and refuses to display results. I had to sort by Name, close the window, and reopen it. Now Spotlight works perfectly.

This problem was originally with Snow Leopard, and persisted on Lion 10.7.0, but seems to have been fixed at some point before Mountain Lion 10.8.4.