Allow or disable Highlight extensions in macOS’s System Settings app.
Highlight extensions improve third-party app searches, letting you lookup extra app-specific content material. This is how you can allow or disable the extensions in macOS.
Highlight is Apple’s search indexing expertise, which quickens searches of information in your Mac or iOS gadget by storing metadata about recordsdata and their contents.
Every now and then, macOS runs a course of within the background to catalog the recordsdata and knowledge in your storage units. This knowledge is saved in an index that Highlight can use to lookup knowledge if you do a search sooner or later.
Conserving indices in your knowledge quickens searches and permits Highlight to find the info you are searching for extra rapidly.
It’s also possible to cease Highlight from looking particular storage volumes or folders. You are able to do this by including them to the System Settings app underneath the Highlight->Search Privateness sheet.
Highlight extensions for third-party apps
Some third-party macOS apps embrace the power to offer their customized knowledge to Highlight via Extensions. These are small chunks of code that the app developer offers, which Highlight can use to incorporate customized knowledge in its index.
Extensions make Highlight searches even quicker as a result of they inform Highlight what knowledge every app makes use of and the way it’s structured. By offering Highlight Extensions, third-party apps in impact inform Highlight how you can rapidly and effectively search and index the info recordsdata these apps create.
While you add a brand new app to your Mac, Highlight Extensions are robotically added if the app consists of them. These are often included inside every app’s bundle (folder) within the /Contants/Library/Highlight folder as .mdimporter recordsdata (which themselves are bundles).
Enabling/disabling Highlight extensions for third-party apps
In macOS Sequoia, you’ll be able to resolve which apps’ Highlight Extensions you need enabled or disabled. Turning off a Highlight Extension in System Settings removes the app-specific information for that app from Highlight.
You would possibly need to do that, for instance, if you do not need Highlight to have additional information about how sure apps’ knowledge or metadata is structured.
Word that disabling a Highlight Extension would not cease Highlight from indexing these sorts of recordsdata. All it does is cease Highlight from having data of the inner workings of the app’s knowledge construction and metadata.
To allow or disable a Highlight Extension for a selected app, go to System Settings->Basic->Login Objects & Extensions->Highlight after which click on the small Information button on the correct. This opens the Highlight Extensions sheet:
Highlight Extensions sheet in macOS’s System Settings app.
For every app listed, flip the swap on the correct to allow or disable Highlight’s capacity to have entry to that app’s knowledge.
There are additionally a number of command-line Highlight utilities you need to use within the macOS Terminal, akin to mdutil and mdfind. For more information on how you can use macOS’s command-line Highlight utilities, see our earlier articles How you can use Highlight’s metadata file utilities in macOS and How you can get extra from Highlight on the Mac.
If you happen to’re a developer, make sure you learn the principle Highlight Basis API Apple documentation and the File Metadata part of the Core Companies documentation.
The 2 primary lessons you may be working with are NSMetadataQuery and NSMetadataItem.
Bear in mind that writing Highlight Extensions and utilizing the Highlight search APIs in your app are two various things.
Subsequent, learn the pretty dated Highlight Importer Programming Information and File Metadata Search Programming Information.
If you happen to’re utilizing Core Knowledge, see Core Knowledge Highlight Integration Programming Information.
