Launching Applications Quickly & Spotlight Shortcuts

Sometimes I find myself needing to open an Application that isn’t in my Dock and can’t be bothered to try and find it in Launchpad now that I have so many applications installed. I have found that the easiest and quickest way to do this is to use Spotlight.
If you hold down the Command+Space-bar keys together this will quickly open the Spotlight search bar at the top right-hand corner of your screen. You can then start typing the name of the Application you want to launch and just press the return key to open that application:

Most people know about this trick with Spotlight. However, like most features of the Mac, Spotlight has a number of shortcuts you can use to quickly perform actions.
Here’s a list of Spotlight keyboard shortcuts that you may find useful:
– Simply move your cursor over an item, or use the arrow keys to navigate and to select items.

1. View the search term in Dictionary: Command-D
2. View the search term in a Quick Look “look up” dictionary window: Command-L
3. Perform a web search for the search term: Command-B
4. View a selected file result in a Quick Look window: hover cursor over an item
5. Reveal selected result in Finder: Command-R
6. Open the Top Hit result: Command-T
7. Open a selected result: Command-O, or Enter, or Return
8. Display a Finder Info window for a result: Command-I

This feature has been tested using OS X v10.8.2 which was the latest Mac OS release at the time of writing and also using the latest Internal and external Apple keyboards.