Use BSP to customize the Spotlight search results with your own categories.

Overview

BSP is a Mac OS X system preference pane that allows you to configure additional categories into Spotlight. When Spotlight has search results that don't fit into one of its pre-defined groups, it sticks the files into the generic Documents listing. With BSP, you can add new categories and assign file types to them. Documents will appear in the search results in their new groups, making them easier to find and work with. You can even edit, rename, or delete the pre-defined Spotlight categories, giving you complete control of the search results display.

Download

The current version is 1.2.0.

Installation

Installation is simple, just double-click the BSP installer package. It will put the preference pane into your /Library/PreferencePanes folder. To use it, go into the System Preferences and select BSP.

BSP requires Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger), because that is the only place you'll find Spotlight. Since BSP makes changes to some system-wide configuration files, you must have administrative priviledges to use it.

Disclaimer

Warning: BSP modifies your system's Spotlight configuration files, and may result in hair loss.

Specifically, the BSP preference pane modifies the following files:

  • /System/Library/CoreServices/Search.bundle/Contents/Resources/MDSimpleGrouping.plist
  • /System/Library/CoreServices/Search.bundle/Contents/Resources/MDOperationsAllowed.plist
  • /System/Library/CoreServices/Search.bundle/Contents/Resources/English.lproj/MDSimpleGrouping.strings
  • /System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app/Contents/Resources/GroupByKind.plist
  • /System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app/Contents/Resources/English.lproj/Localizable.strings
  • ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.spotlight.plist (where ~ is your home directory)

Read the license, use at your own risk, etc.

Author

BSP was written by James G. Speth.

Feedback

Feel free to send me any feedback at speth@end.com.

License

Creative Commons License This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.