Spotlight Surgeon

Spotlight occasionally forgets the obvious.

An installed app disappears from search. A deleted app keeps showing up as a ghost. The usual repair path is a mix of mdutil, LaunchServices rebuilds, and a few commands that are easy to copy from the internet but hard to trust when you do not remember exactly what they touch.

So I wrapped the common repair flow into a tiny transparent CLI: Spotlight Surgeon.

• It has a doctor command for diagnostics.
• It supports --dry-run so you can see the commands before running them.
• It explains the Spotlight and LaunchServices repair steps instead of hiding them.
• It does not delete apps or user files.
• It is one zsh file, not a replacement launcher.

The project is intentionally small. It is for the moment when you still want to use native macOS Spotlight, but you need to nudge the index and app registry back into shape.

git clone https://github.com/00xmorty/spotlight-surgeon.git
cd spotlight-surgeon
./spotlight-surgeon.zsh doctor
./spotlight-surgeon.zsh fix --dry-run

The first public release is here:

Spotlight Surgeon v0.1.0

And the repository is here:

github.com/00xmorty/spotlight-surgeon

This came out of my small-product pipeline: find a narrow daily annoyance, keep the implementation boring, ship the first useful version, and only then decide if it deserves more surface area.

Possible next steps are a Homebrew formula, better JSON output for automation, and a small demo GIF. But for now the useful thing is already public: a safe wrapper around a problem I keep seeing on my own machines.