Effectively Turn Off Spotlight 6
Tip
Hey
Some people hate using and having Spotligh turned on. It can use a lot of CPU and take up quite a bit of time with disk access. If you want to turn it off, there is hundreds of different methods and ways to do this. Most involve changing system files. Although this might be relatively straight forward it can produce some problems and may break the stability of your system. Today’s post will show you how to turn off Spotlight without having to fiddle with anything.
Spotlight preference’s are run from System Preferences > Spotlight, so lets open up this preference pane. Then select Privacy from the the two tab options at the top of the window. From this option you can exclude files, folders and drives from being scanned. Its useful if you don’t want certain files appearing in search results.
To effectively turn off Spotlight, press the small plus button at the bottom of the window. Here select your Macintosh Hard Drive, and any other drives you have on your system and add them to the list. What will happen now is Spotlight will exclude these files and folders from Spotlight and it probably will not add them to the index.
It is by no means a perfect solution, and you will probably find the Spotlight background services will run every so often. However if you want a quick and simple way to stop it in its tracks, this is a pretty simple way to get around this. You could go into changing background services, however that is a lot more work and a lot harder to do. If you ever want to revert this process, all you have to do is remove the hard drives from the menu.
Where To Next?
6 Responses to “Effectively Turn Off Spotlight”
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Really nice, thanks!
Additionally you can also hide the spotlight-icon in toolbar by downloading Onyx. When you open the application, choose ‘Parameters’ and then ‘Spotlight’. There you can see some option for changing the way spotlight behaves.
Might come in handy =)Comment By Cas on October 26th, at 12:44 pm
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Here are instructions I found on MacWorld Hints to disable the indexing service and remove the icon from the menu bar:
To turn Spotlight Indexing off in open Terminal and run this command:sudo mdutil -a -i off
To turn Spotlight Indexing back on, repeat the above command, but change off to on. To remove the menu bar icon, run this Terminal command:
sudo chmod 600 /System/Library/CoreServices/Search.bundle/Contents/MacOS/Search
You'll then to restart the menu bar with killall SystemUIServer to see the icon vanish.
Comment By Brian Hanifin on October 26th, at 5:37 pm
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Yes friend, it “effectively turns off Spotlight” all right but it also renders useless the Cmd-F find command and, should you change your mind, can take a LONG time to reindex the machine (in progress here as I write; time remaining estimates currently range from 45 minutes to 2 hrs and it’s been at it at least an hour).
Comment By Francis Drake on October 28th, at 2:42 pm
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Does using spotlight reduce your battery life?
Comment By James on November 13th, at 9:55 am
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5
Spotlight is awesome!
Comment By Nicolae Vartolomei on November 15th, at 9:39 pm
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Only wanna input on few general things, The website layout is perfect, the subject material is real superb : D.
Comment By Hattie Tankard on November 23rd, at 7:56 pm