Allow or disable Highlight extensions in macOS’s System Settings app.
Highlight extensions improve third-party app searches, letting you search for extra app-specific content material. Here is find out how to allow or disable the extensions in macOS.
Highlight is Apple’s search indexing expertise, which accelerates searches of information in your Mac or iOS system by storing metadata about recordsdata and their contents.
Every so often, macOS runs a course of within the background to catalog the recordsdata and information in your storage gadgets. This information is saved in an index that Highlight can use to search for information whenever you do a search sooner or later.
Conserving indices in your information accelerates searches and permits Highlight to find the info you are in search of extra rapidly.
You too can 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 embody the flexibility to offer their customized information to Highlight by way of Extensions. These are small chunks of code that the app developer gives, which Highlight can use to incorporate customized information in its index.
Extensions make Highlight searches even sooner as a result of they inform Highlight what information every app makes use of and the way it’s structured. By offering Highlight Extensions, third-party apps in impact inform Highlight find out how to 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 routinely added if the app contains 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 possibly can determine 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 more information about how sure apps’ information or metadata is structured.
Observe that disabling a Highlight Extension would not cease Highlight from indexing these sorts of recordsdata. All it does is cease Highlight from having information of the interior workings of the app’s information construction and metadata.
To allow or disable a Highlight Extension for a selected app, go to System Settings->Normal->Login Gadgets & Extensions->Highlight after which click on the small Data button on the fitting. This opens the Highlight Extensions sheet:
Highlight Extensions sheet in macOS’s System Settings app.
For every app listed, flip the change on the fitting to allow or disable Highlight’s capability to have entry to that app’s information.
There are additionally a number of command-line Highlight utilities you should use within the macOS Terminal, corresponding to mdutil and mdfind. For more information on find out how to 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.
For those who’re a developer, make sure to learn the primary Highlight Basis API Apple documentation and the File Metadata part of the Core Companies documentation.
The 2 primary courses you will be working with are NSMetadataQuery and NSMetadataItem.
Remember 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.
For those who’re utilizing Core Knowledge, see Core Knowledge Highlight Integration Programming Information.
