Blog
Notes from the launcher
Product updates, deep dives into keyboard-first workflows, and the occasional rant about Spotlight. Written by the CmdSpace team.
Hidden macOS keyboard shortcuts in 2026 that Apple doesn't advertise
macOS ships with hundreds of keyboard shortcuts. Apple documents maybe 60 of them. The rest live in source code, in obscure Apple Developer notes, and in long-tenured Mac users' muscle memory.
The Finder shortcuts cheatsheet every macOS user should know
Finder is the macOS app most users touch dozens of times a day, and the macOS app most users use the slowest. Apple has spent twenty years adding keyboard shortcuts to Finder; most users have memorized seven of them.
How to safely disable Spotlight indexing without breaking macOS
There is a particular kind of frustration that ends with the words "I just want to turn this thing off". On Sequoia and Tahoe 26 a lot of Mac users have arrived at exactly that thought about Spotlight — often after watching mdsstores chew…
CmdSpace vs Spotlight: side-by-side after Tahoe 26
Spotlight is the macOS launcher most users default to because it ships with the OS. It is also the macOS launcher most power users have spent the last two years complaining about. After Sequoia's indexing regressions (Notebookcheck coverag…
The best macOS launcher in 2026: a tested, no-AI-hype roundup
A modern macOS launcher should do four things well: open apps and files in under a quarter second, run a few high-impact actions without leaving the keyboard, stay out of the way when you do not need it, and never quietly ship your text to…
How to audit your launcher's network activity on macOS
Your launcher is the app you press more times a day than any other. It has Accessibility permission, Full Disk Access, and a foreground process that runs constantly. If it phones home — to log usage, to fetch updates, to sync settings, to…