Spotlight problems
If your Mac is set to German, typing Calendar may find nothing while Kalender finds it immediately.
On a Mac running a non-English system language, apps are reported as only matching their localised names in Spotlight. The English name that the application bundle is actually called on disk does not find it.
This is one of the behaviours collected in Michael Tsai's February 2026 round-up of Spotlight problems in macOS 26, alongside apps not surfacing at all and results reordering during selection.
Most people who set their Mac to German or French still think about software in a mixture of two languages. Documentation, forums, colleagues and muscle memory all use the English name. The file on disk uses the English name too: Calendar.app is Calendar.app whatever the menu bar says.
So the name you type is the name the file actually has, and it does not match. That is a particularly confusing failure, because the obvious mental model, "it is searching file names", is exactly the thing it is not doing.
Type the localised name. Kalender, Systemeinstellungen, Vorschau. It works, it is just not what you were thinking.
Filter to apps first. Command and Space, then Command and 1, then type. This does not fix the localisation matching, but it removes everything else from the results, so a partial match on the right app has less to compete with.
Search the folder instead. /Applications in Finder is still a folder full of files with English names, and Finder's own search on filenames still finds them.
An app has at least two names: the one on disk and the one shown to you. Spotlight is matching against the display name and not, apparently, against the bundle name. Any search tool that indexes real filenames has the opposite behaviour, and finds Calendar.app when you type Calendar regardless of the system language.
Everywhere indexes what is on disk. Calendar.app is what the file is called, so that is what finds it, on a Mac set to any language. The trade is the mirror image: it will not find Kalender, because no file is named that.
On a non-English system, Spotlight in macOS 26 has been reported to match only the localised display name. Type the localised name, for example Kalender on a German system, or filter to apps with Command and 1 first.
Yes. The bundle in /Applications keeps its English name whatever the system language is set to. The localised name is a display name, not the filename.
Documents do not have localised display names, so the specific problem is limited to applications and a few system items that do.
Everywhere keeps track of every file on your Mac — including the folders Spotlight hides and drives you have unplugged. Free for a day, then $19 once.
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