MacOS – 3rd party app to perform regex search on Spotlight index

macosspotlight

There is no native way to perform a regex search on the Spotlight index as discussed here:

Is there a 3rd party tool that can do a regex search on the Spotlight index? Or is the Spotlight index designed such that there is no way to search it with regex using any 3rd party tool because the data structures of the index does not support fast regex search?

Best Answer

Proprietary and Private

Apple's Spotlight index is proprietary, not publicly documented, and subject to change without notice. Third party tools will rarely, if ever, use it as an index.

Spotlight is not designed to support PCRE style regular expressions.