Add Markdown Indexing to Mac OS X Spotlight​

~ Baltazaar

Markdown Indexing in OS X Spotlight Search

You can do this without disabling SIP by creating a copy of the system RichText.mdimporter, modifying its Info.plist and saving it in /Library/Spotlight.

  1. cp -r /System/Library/Spotlight/RichText.mdimporter ~/
    (This copies the .mdimporter to the root of your user home directory)
  2. You can either use an editor from the command line or go to a Finder window in your Home folder and do a “Show Package Contents” on the RichText.mdimporter file bundle to get to the Info.plist file and open it with ‘Text Edit’ or any Plain Text Editor.
Inside RichText.mdimporter/Contents/Info.plist, add: 
net.daringfireball.markdown
to the array of LSItemContentTypes in that file as shown here:
markdown-finder.png

Rename the RichText.mdimporter to Markdown.mdimporter:
mv ~/RichText.mdimporter Markdown.mdimporter

Copy the new .mdimporter to /Library/Spotlight:
sudo cp -R ~/Markdown.mdimporter /Library/Spotlight

Use the mdimport command to add it to the metadata indexing system:
mdimport -r /Library/Spotlight/Markdown.mdimporter
This command asks the server to reimport files for UTIs claimed by the listed plugin.

It should re-import the files automatically after the previous caommand, but if you wish, you can always re-index the whole drive to include the new filetype by rebuilding the whole Spotlight index:
sudo mdutil -E /

(Note: This will take some time, and is rather resource heavy…)

Now you should be good to go with .markdown files being indexed by Spotlight!