Note: This is for Yosemite or before, for El Capitan or later, see A Yosemite Markdown Spotlight Importer.

I noticed recently that Spotlight on Yosemite was no longer indexing my Markdown files. Since all my notes are in Markdown format, and Spotlight is how I find my notes, this was a big problem. Reinstalling my current set of Markdown editors did not help.

This did. Huge thanks to Gereon Sommer for the idea in Mac OS X Spotlight Enhancement.

The idea is to use a built-in importer, in this case RichText, to do all the work for you. Note that this will probably need to be repeated on each Operating System install or upgrade.

Edit /System/Library/Spotlight/RichText.mdimporter/Contents/Info.plist and add <string>net.daringfireball.markdown</string> under LSItemContentTypes:

...
	<key>LSItemContentTypes</key>
	<array>
			<string>public.rtf</string>
			<string>public.html</string>
			<string>public.xml</string>
			<string>public.plain-text</string>
			<string>com.apple.traditional-mac-plain-text</string>
			<string>com.apple.rtfd</string>
			<string>com.apple.webarchive</string>
			<string>org.oasis-open.opendocument.text</string>
			<string>org.openxmlformats.wordprocessingml.document</string>
		<string>net.daringfireball.markdown</string>
	</array>
...		

You will need an admin password to save the changes.

Restart the Rich Text importer

mdimport -r /System/Library/Spotlight/RichText.mdimporter

And force a Spotlight re-index

	sudo mdutil -E /

To test this I created a new Markdown file in BBEdit and added the word wagga to it. After a few minutes of re-indexing, Spotlight found this file in a wagga search.

Good to go.

Follow the author as @hiltmon on Twitter.