Spotlight Search Bar – Spotlight Search Bar Doesn’t Show Up in Middle of Screen

macossearchspotlight

For some reason, when I activate Spotlight, the bar shows up in the top right part of the screen instead of the middle. I've tried restarting and connecting to an external monitor, to no avail.

Best Answer

The Spotlight window remembers its last location. You can drag it back to the original location — it snaps to the X and Y coordinates of the initial position, so you can ensure it is back where it started.

If the Spotlight bar does not remember its last location, make sure ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.Spotlight.plist is writeable, as this plist file is where the coordinates are stored.

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MacOS – Spotlight menu shows results, but Finder window doesn’t

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.

How to restore Spotlight search to the menu bar? (10.7)

I would imagine that inverting your commands would do the trick. Try:

sudo mdutil -a -i on
sudo chmod 755 /System/Library/CoreServices/Search.bundle/Contents/MacOS/Search
sudo killall SystemUIServer

Best Answer

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MacOS – Spotlight menu shows results, but Finder window doesn’t

How to restore Spotlight search to the menu bar? (10.7)

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