Why on my machine when I search in Spotlight for things like
Disk Utility
Terminal etc
does it appear to find VMWare Fusion binaries before finding any of the standard apps?
This is an incredibly annoying feature when you use Spotlight as an App Launcher.
Also this is with vmware fusion 12.2.4
If I search and launch Disk Utility or Terminal etc I don't expect it to have to launch VMWare Fusion ever.
That's very strange behavior indeed. It's not something that I would expect either.
I took a look on my Mac running Monterey, and nothing Fusion related comes up when searching for Disk Utility or Terminal in Spotlight. Certainly if I launch either of them from Spotlight, Fusion does not launch.
I wonder if your Spotlight database could be broken. Have you tried rebuilding it by following the instructions in the Apple Tech note https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201716
You would add your Macintosh HD (the boot drive) to the Privacy tab, then remove it instead of the "Documents" folder that is described in the tech note. Doing that will rebuild your Spotlight database (it may take a while).
As an alternative, have you looked at using Launchpad as an application launcher? It allows you to customize the application icon presentation, and even provides a search field. It's worked well for me instead of Spotlight or trying to cram a whole bunch of icons in the Dock. Keyboard F4 brings up Launchpad, then I either find what I want on the first screen, or if I'm lazy just type the name of an app I'm looking for (e.g. 'Word' for Microsoft Word).
The other thing I'm thinking of is that the macOS Launch Services database is somehow messed up.
Try rebuilding the Spotlight database first, then if you still encounter the issue, the next step might be to rebuild the Launch Services database using information in Howard Oakley's eclecticlight.co article https://eclecticlight.co/2017/08/11/launch-services-database-problems-correcting-and-rebuilding/
So I found an old VMware Fusion VM from 2013 and in the vmwarevm folder there's a Applications folder and in there there are a number of applications including "Disk Utility.app" and "Terminal.app"
