 Spotlight is one of the coolest features of Mac OS now on this channel. You won't hear me say too many things that are Positive about Mac OS, but searchlight is definitely one of those features that Mac does really really well now One thing as a Linux user I will say is that Linux has had this spotlight functionality in many different applications for a Very very long time long before Mac OS had it So technically Linux is still better than Mac nana nana boo boo But the point is is that spotlight is really really good and since it has improved There have been many more improvements on the Linux side and there have been many more attempts at Replicating that type of functionality on some Linux distributions now today What we're going to do is take a look at another one of those Attempts and this is called searchlight and this is a genome extension So it will only work if you use genome. So Unfortunately, that's just the way we'll have to deal with it But it's actually pretty cool, but it's only pretty cool and it's almost almost there So we'll talk about that. So let me show you what this looks like So we're here in a boon-to and I chose a boon-to simply because I had it happen to have the ISO around But basically what searchlight is is it looks like? Spotlight for Linux now, obviously it's just for gnome But still its purpose is to search the system for basically anything and I Specifically use those words because it's specifically for the system. There is no web search here That's a big part of it. That's missing. Hopefully that will come in the future But if what you want is something that will search your system in a very Appealing manner or very aesthetically pleasing manner then searchlight is something that you might want to look into So let's just say you wanted to search for a file that you happen to have on your system I happen to know I have tux here in a file and it does show me that if I click on it It will show me tux inside of the image viewer if I do that again and search for tux I can actually just use the enter key and it'll do the same thing now It will also search for applications So I know I have a system monitor on here so I can open it up type in system monitor and it'll come up so it has a very good job of Searching the system for both applications that you have installed and files on your system now I'm not sure how well it will work if you have a ton of files. This is a brand new installed VM So there's not a lot of files here So it may slow down if you have a ton of files I'm not sure but it uses the same search functionality you get built into GNOME So if you type in tux if you can actually type good Lord It does the same thing here inside of the search application for GNOME it just does it in a prettier manner so Files and applications that are on your system. It does a very good job of finding now One place where it does kind of fall down is searching for applications that are not on your system So if you use just the regular GNOME search and type in like telegram like this It'll eventually come up with telegram from the software store And it will show you anything that's related to that have to that search right from the software center And you see how quick that is if we were to use search light to do the same thing So let's just search for discord. It will search for it, but it's going to take a little bit longer I'm not sure what the delay is there and sometimes it takes even longer than that But it does it does and will search the software center Just like the regular GNOME search will and like I said it will do so in an Aesthetically pleasing manner. It just it looks very nice right and of course it doesn't take up the whole screen It just takes up the center of the screen So when you use the search for GNOME It actually takes you out of whatever you're doing and takes you into this view here And then you have to do your search. So if you search for telegram again or whatever It takes up the entire user experience where if you search for Telegram in search light, it only takes up the small space So the ways of searching may be the same, but it doesn't necessarily take you out of the user experience So it makes it much easier if you're searching for something But you are kind of like looking how you're supposed to spell it or whatever you can do so much easier here Than in the other UI now the last thing that I want to show you here before we jump into the settings is just that it will not Show you anything from the web. So if you turn search search for something like that Eventually it's gonna come up. It does for some reason show you some results from the software center I don't know why that happens to be but it doesn't show you anything from the web if they were to institute Web search inside of this it would make it even more appealing because it has the same Limitations as this here. So if we type in like so you don't get any web results from here either So it's because it's using the same. I'm gonna call it search engine But you get that it uses the same source of the search results as this does so it's going to have the same results and Same limitations. So if they could add web search to it, you know using duck duck go or whatever That'd be make it so much better. So the last thing we should take a look at is installation and Settings so this is a genome extension. So you have to install it through the genome extension manager or through the genome extensions website, however, you manage your extensions and I've chose the genome extensions manager you can get that on flat hub and You just go here search for search light and it's right here and hit install It will install it and then you'll get this entry here inside of your installed extensions And then you have the settings so by default there is no default key binding So you'll have to set your own key binding. I chose all D I was gonna try to use super D because I'm used to Rofi coming up with super D But super D is a minimize key binding for Ubuntu So I couldn't use that but I set the key binding and it will allow you to choose where it will show up If you have multiple monitors, which is really nice It'll also it will also allow you to choose to have it pop up on the monitor that isn't focused So if your cursor is on the other monitor, it would hope it would pop up over there instead of popping up Where the cursor is not that's really nice. It will also allow you to display a Icon up here at the top. So if you didn't want to use a key binding, you could use that as well Oddly it doesn't go away when you click the icon again. You have to hit escape It would be nice if once you click on that it pops up you click it again It should go away it but it does not so that's one thing in terms of appearance You do actually have quite a bit of control over how it looks so you can change the text color the text size and the The search text size you can choose how wide and high it is in terms of the dimensions The border thickness and the border radius and the border color So if you're a themeer you can alter this to look however you want Including how much transparency it has the intensity of the blur and so on and so forth It also allows you to control the brightness So if you have a darker or lighter white wallpaper, you can set it up so that you can at least see it, right? so you do have a fair amount of control over what it looks like which is More honestly than I expected. So that is searchlight. There's not much more here that I can show you It's a really nice alternative to the search that is built into Ubuntu and other genome-based distros that's basically what it is and That's basically all it needs to be I would really like it if they added web search because that would add Even more functionality and it would make it much more like spotlight Which is what it's trying to emulate if you've ever used spotlight before you'll know that it searches basically everything So, you know, it will search through Wikipedia and it will do a Google search and whatever now I understand that as an open-source project. They probably don't want to use proprietary stuff So searching Google's probably out, but you could use duck duck go or Cirques or something like that and that would add a whole bunch more functionality on top of this and that would make it Even more useful. So like I said, that is searchlight a brief little look at a genome extension And then I found pretty useful when I'm in a genome environment So if you have thoughts on this, you can leave those in the comment section below You can follow me on masses on our odyssey those links will be in the video description You can support me on patreon at patreon.com slash Linux cast links for YouTube and the bearer pay will be in the video description Thanks to everybody who does support me on patreon YouTube. You guys are all Absolutely amazing without you the channel does not be anywhere near where it is right now. So thank you so very very very much for your support I truly do appreciate it. You guys are awesome. Thanks everybody for watching. I'll see you next time