Improved Finder / Spotlight search using Raycast extension

Name: Improved Finder / Spotlight search using Raycast extension
Availability: InStock
Author: atharva_n

by atharva_n·Feb 18, 2026·1 point·0 comments

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AI Analysis

●●SolidNiche GemSolve My ProblemShip It

The Take

It tames Spotlight by scoping searches to user-configured folders and applying exclusion globs (node_modules, site-packages, .git), then re-ranks results by a 60% relevance / 40% recency mix so recent, relevant files bubble up. The pipeline is simple and practical — Raycast → Python → mdfind → filter+rank → JSON — which makes it a quick win for anyone annoyed by noisy Spotlight results, but it’s more pragmatic engineering than breakthrough research.

Post Description

Finder / Spotlight search on Mac isn't great. It usually gives me a lot of junk (python caches, irrelevant system files, etc), instead of what I'm looking for. So I decided to implement my own filtering + search, with an extension to Raycast.

Key features

- Search is limited to my Documents/ and Downloads/ folders – where 95% of my relevant files are.

- Also, there are a lot of Claude-generated exclusion patterns!

- Filtering is simple – I'm just doing it by sub/string match.

Finder does have a lot of niceties (previewing files, looking at metadata, etc). So the default behaviour is 'hit enter' to open in Finder. Or 'Cmd + enter' opens the file directly.