The Spotlight File System for MacFUSE

Tuesday, January 23, 2007 at 10:49 AM

Posted by Greg Miller, Software Engineer, Mac Team

A little over a week ago, we announced the open-source release of MacFUSE. Since FUSE makes it so easy to slap a file system view on data, I thought it might be neat to give Spotlight a file system interface. So in my spare time I wrote SpotlightFS, which is now available for download from the MacFUSE project page.

SpotlightFS is a MacFUSE file system that creates true smart folders, where the folders' contents are dynamically generated by querying Spotlight. This differs from Finder's version of smart folders, which are really plist files with a ".savedSearch" file extension. Since SpotlightFS smart folders are true folders, they can be used from anywhere—including the command line!

SpotlightFS is not very complicated, and it's a good example of what can quickly and easily be done using MacFUSE. Please check out SpotlightFS and the other cool stuff on the newly updated MacFUSE project site.