Bike documents in spotlight results on macOS 15.x?

Bike Outliner
1

Is anyone else seeing weird spotlight results on macOS 15?

For me I am seeing:

  1. If you search for .bike document’s content it doesn’t show in the Spotlight palette results
  2. BUT it does show if you search in Finder window’s search field

I am also seeing this same behavior for plain .html documents. On the other handle .txt documents do show up in both locations, but only sometimes in the Spotlight palette.

When I say “Spotlight Palette” I mean the popup window that shows when you do Command-Space. An when I say finder windows search field I mean when you open the spotlight palette the last item says “Search in Finder” … choose that.

If you are using macOS 15 can you let me know if you are getting .bike and .html results and if they show up in the palette, or only in the finder window results/

2

I see the same inconsistent results

3

Same with alfred. i can’t search for .Bike or .opml

4

More info…

First I will just consider .html files here, Bike files are a specialization of .html files, and have the same spotlight behaviors described below. If we just focus on .html files then we can remove Bike as a variable.

The problem: .html files do not show up, when matched by content (not filename), in the “Spotlight search” panel that shows when you use the Command-Spacebar shortcut.

On the other hand .html files do show up when you:

  1. When using the terminal and searching using mdfind spotlighttest
  2. Search using the search field in the upper right corner of the Finder window

The above tests indicate to me that the .html files are being properly indexed by spotlight, but are for some reason excluded from the Spotlight search popup.

I think you can reproduce the results yourself like this:

% echo spotlighttest > testone.txt
% echo spotlighttest > testtwo.html
% mdfind spotlighttest       
2024-12-30 14:22:28.552 mdfind[28326:550500] [UserQueryParser] Loading keywords and predicates for locale "en_US"
2024-12-30 14:22:28.553 mdfind[28326:550500] [UserQueryParser] Loading keywords and predicates for locale "en"
~/Desktop/Spotlighttest/testone.txt
~/Desktop/Spotlighttest/testtwo.html

I believe the fact that mdfind returns both files means they are properly indexed. But even after that if I you do Command-Spacebar and search for “spotlighttest” I think only the testone will show in the results.

All of this seems to mean that .bike files also will not show up in macOS sequoia spotlight popup results, and I’m not sure that there’s anything I can do about it.

5

A small bit of progress. HTML files will show up, even in the spotlight popup, if you explicitly include the HTML kind like this:

kind:HTML AND spotlighttest

And similarly you can type:

kind:BIKE AND spotlighttest

And then Bike files will show up.

So it’s possible, but why is it needed for HTML and Bike files? Spotlight search can find many other files types without having to specify the kind like this.

6

More progress… it turns out you don’t need to include kind:Bike for Bike files to show up in spotlight search results, instead you just need the search to be recognized as a metadata query, apparently that takes a different code path that will include .bike, .html, .opml, etc document types in results.

spotlighttest OR thiscanbeanything

WILL include .bike files that contain the text “spotlighttext” in the spotlight search results. Phew… what a pain!