I’m seeing inconsistent Spotlight behavior on macOS 26 Tahoe. In System Settings → Spotlight, I have: Apps: enabled Files: disabled Folders: disabled Despite this, Spotlight still shows regular files from many locations, including application support folders and user Library containers. Examples: /Applications/Adobe After Effects 2026/Presets/Image - Special Effects/Night Vision.ffx /Applications/Utilities/Adobe Creative Cloud/Components/CCLibs/resources/designLibraries/main.js.map /Users//Library/Containers/com.docker.docker/Data/log/vm/kmsg.log.0 I also added: /Applications/Adobe After Effects 2026/Presets to Spotlight → Search Privacy, but Spotlight continued to show: Night Vision.ffx in the Spotlight UI. This is reproducible with mdfind as well: mdfind 'kMDItemFSName == "Night Vision.ffx"c' returns: /Applications/Adobe After Effects 2026/Presets/Image - Special Effects/Night Vision.ffx I rebuilt the Spotlight index with: sudo mdutil -i off / sudo mdutil -X / sudo mdutil -i on / sudo mdutil -E / but the behavior persisted. I also encountered a separate but likely related issue where installed applications were temporarily missing from Spotlight search. For example, Visual Studio Code existed at: /Applications/Visual Studio Code.app and its Info.plist contained the correct bundle identifier: com.microsoft.VSCode but initially: mdls "/Applications/Visual Studio Code.app" returned: could not find /Applications/Visual Studio Code.app and: mdfind 'kMDItemCFBundleIdentifier == "com.microsoft.VSCode"' returned nothing. However, test-importing the app worked correctly: mdimport -t -d2 "/Applications/Visual Studio Code.app" and showed valid metadata such as: kMDItemCFBundleIdentifier = "com.microsoft.VSCode" kMDItemContentType = "com.apple.application-bundle" kMDItemDisplayName = "Visual Studio Code" Restarting Spotlight-related services: killall Spotlight killall corespotlightd sudo killall mds sudo killall mds_stores caused application indexing to start working again. After that, Visual Studio Code correctly appeared in: mdfind 'kMDItemCFBundleIdentifier == "com.microsoft.VSCode"' But the original problem remains: regular files still appear in Spotlight even though Files and Folders are disabled. I also verified that adding: com.apple.metadata:kMDItemSupportFileType = MDSystemFile as an extended attribute to a file makes it disappear from the Spotlight UI, which suggests the files are being indexed and surfaced despite the UI exclusion settings. Expected behavior: When Files and Folders are disabled in Spotlight settings, Spotlight should only show applications and should not show arbitrary files such as .ffx, .js.map, logs, presets, or application-support files. Also, files located inside a folder listed under Search Privacy should not appear in Spotlight results. Actual behavior: Spotlight continues to show these files, including files inside folders explicitly excluded by Search Privacy. This appears to be either: a regression in Spotlight result filtering on macOS 26 Tahoe, or a mismatch between the “Apps” category and application-related content indexing. It would be useful to know whether this is a known issue.