[X4U] Can you delete a file(move to the trash) in spotlight?

[Daly Jessup]

Ralph Jones wrote:

>Folks sometimes confuse Spotlight with the Finder File>Find menu item.
>
>You invoke File>Find by pressing CMD+F in the Finder, and you invoke 
>Spotlight by pressing the key combination that is specified in the 
>Spotlight item in System Preferences (if enabled; the default is 
>CMD+Spacebar).
>
>Spotlight doesn't allow deleting a file; File>Find does:
>
>+ Invoke Spotlight in the Finder, highlight a file in the list and 
>press CMD+Backspace; the System emits the alert sound specified in 
>the Sound item in System Preferences and does nothing to the 
>highlighted file.
>
>+ Press CMD+F in Finder, highlight a file in the list and press CMD+ 
>Backspace; the file moves to the Trash as indicated by the file path 
>at the bottom of the window (some have described this as Spotlight 
>behavior; it is not).

Right you are. In Leopard at least, there is a third option: Use 
Spotlight from the menu bar, then choose Show All and you get a 
window in the Finder where you CAN delete with Command-Delete. But I 
just now found out, as Linda said, that in Tiger it doesn't work in 
the window from Show All. I thought it did. I guess I was thinking of 
Command-F in Tiger, where it did work.

Anyway in Leopard you can delete found items either from the 
Command-F found items list OR from the Show-All list after a 
Spotlight search.  Actually, I now see that the Command-F and  the 
Show-All windows are quite different from each other in Tiger, but 
almost exactly the same in Leopard. So it's not a surprise that the 
two windows behave the same in Leopard, but not in Tiger.

Anyway, if Ed wants to search for things and delete them in Tiger, I 
suggest he use Command-F rather than the Spotlight item in the menu 
bar.

Daly
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