It's a reference to Sherlock (and later Spotlight) being added to macOS, rendering the previous third-party search-launcher tools obsolete.
It's a reference to Sherlock (and later Spotlight) being added to macOS, rendering the previous third-party search-launcher tools obsolete.
Thank you, I learned it today. On the other side, some users replaced Sherlock (Spotlight) with Alfred.
And somewhere in there Quicksilver was pretty popular. And now in 2026 the main competition is Raycast. An evergreen space really.
I think the Sherlock thing was in the OS 8 or OS 9 days whereas Spotlight didn’t come around until sometime in macOS X, maybe 10.4 or so?