Spotlight Search

Spotlight Search (mdfind)

Fast file discovery using macOS Spotlight's pre-built index. Faster than grep/rg for broad searches.

Dependencies

• macOS - Spotlight is macOS-only
• pdftotext (optional) - For extracting text from PDF results (brew install poppler)

Core Patterns

Simple Search (names + content)

mdfind "quarterly report"

Search by Filename

mdfind -name "quarterly_report"          # Filename contains this string
mdfind -name ".pdf"                       # All PDFs by extension

Scoped to Directory

mdfind -onlyin ~/Downloads "invoice 2024"
mdfind -onlyin ~ "project proposal"  # home directory

Content-Specific Search

mdfind 'kMDItemTextContent == "*budget*"'
mdfind 'kMDItemTextContent CONTAINS[cd] "project status"'  # case-insensitive

By File Type (standalone)

mdfind 'kind:pdf'
mdfind 'kind:word'                       # Word docs
mdfind 'kind:presentation'               # PowerPoint/Keynote
mdfind 'kind:spreadsheet'                # Excel/Numbers

File Type + Content (use -interpret)

# The -interpret flag allows combining kind: with text search
mdfind -interpret 'kind:pdf budget'
mdfind -interpret 'kind:word meeting notes'
mdfind -onlyin ~/Downloads -interpret 'kind:pdf invoice'

Combined Predicates (full syntax)

# Multiple content terms (AND)
mdfind 'kMDItemTextContent == "*invoice*" && kMDItemTextContent == "*2024*"'

# File type + content (use kMDItemContentType, NOT kind:)
mdfind 'kMDItemContentType == "com.adobe.pdf" && kMDItemTextContent == "*contract*"'

# Common content types:
#   com.adobe.pdf                    - PDF
#   com.microsoft.word.doc           - Word .doc
#   org.openxmlformats.wordprocessingml.document  - Word .docx
#   public.plain-text                - Plain text
#   public.html                      - HTML

By Date

# Modified today
mdfind 'kMDItemFSContentChangeDate > $time.today'

# Modified in last 7 days
mdfind 'kMDItemFSContentChangeDate > $time.today(-7)'

# Created after specific date
mdfind 'kMDItemFSCreationDate > $time.iso(2026-01-01)'

Example Output

$ mdfind -onlyin ~/Downloads "quarterly report"
/Users/me/Downloads/Q3 Quarterly Report.pdf
/Users/me/Downloads/quarterly-report-draft.docx
/Users/me/Downloads/Budget Notes.txt

Limitations

mdfind returns file paths only - no content snippets or context around matches.

For context extraction, use a two-step approach:

# Step 1: Find files
# Step 2: Extract context with rg

# Plain text files
mdfind -onlyin ~/Downloads "project status" | xargs rg -C 3 "status"

# PDFs (requires pdftotext from poppler)
mdfind -interpret 'kind:pdf budget' | while read f; do
  echo "=== $f ==="
  pdftotext "$f" - 2>/dev/null | rg -C 2 -i "budget" || true
done

Useful Metadata Keys

Sorting Results

mdfind doesn't sort. To sort by date:

# Sort by last modified (most recent first)
mdfind -onlyin ~/Downloads "query" | while IFS= read -r f; do
  ts=$(mdls -raw -name kMDItemFSContentChangeDate "$f" 2>/dev/null)
  printf '%s\t%s\n' "$ts" "$f"
done | sort -r | cut -f2-

Tips

1. Exclude noise: Pipe through grep -v to filter out unwanted paths

   mdfind "query" | grep -v "node_modules\|\.git\|Library/Caches"
   

2. Limit results: Use head for quick exploration

   mdfind "query" | head -20
   

3. Check what's indexed: Some folders may be excluded from Spotlight

   # System Preferences > Siri & Spotlight > Spotlight Privacy
   

4. Force reindex (if results seem stale):

   sudo mdutil -E /  # Rebuilds entire index - takes time
   

Common Use Cases

Find documents with multiple terms

mdfind -onlyin ~ 'kMDItemTextContent == "*invoice*" && kMDItemTextContent == "*2024*"'

Find documents matching any of several terms

mdfind 'kMDItemTextContent == "*resume*" || kMDItemTextContent == "*CV*"'

Find PDFs containing specific text

mdfind -interpret 'kind:pdf quarterly report'
# OR with full predicate:
mdfind 'kMDItemContentType == "com.adobe.pdf" && kMDItemTextContent == "*quarterly report*"'

Find recently modified documents by topic

mdfind -onlyin ~/Documents 'kMDItemFSContentChangeDate > $time.today(-7) && kMDItemTextContent == "*meeting*"'

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