# searchlight ng
Searchlight NG is a GNOME Shell extension that pulls the app search out of the Overview and into a standalone popup, in the spirit of macOS Spotlight or Alfred. Hit Ctrl+Super+Space (you can rebind it) and start typing, no need to fling your mouse to a corner first. Once you get used to it, opening apps the normal way starts to feel slow.
This is my personal fork of icedman’s search-light. I use it every day, so when new GNOME releases broke it I started patching it myself, and the fork grew from there. It now runs on GNOME Shell 48 through 50, and along the way I fixed a bunch of bugs: crashes around icon dragging, the panel icon getting stuck or doubled during the search overlay transitions, animation glitches and the first result not highlighting properly.
The biggest thing I added myself is a theming engine. The appearance preferences now come with theme presets you can pick from, instead of fiddling with every color and border setting by hand, and the styling underneath got reworked with proper explicit background rules so the presets actually look how they should.
If you’re on a supported GNOME and want a Spotlight-style launcher, grab it from the repo. And credit where it’s due, the extension itself is icedman’s work, I just keep my copy healthy and make it a bit more mine.
~$