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Tiger Tips: Hate Spotlight? Turn it off

spotlight iconThere's a very detailed, Terminal-intensive and (imho) somewhat just plain crazy and risky hack over at Mac OS X Hints that shows you how to eradicate Spotlight from Tiger. However, MacFixIt offers a simpler solution for turning off Spotlight if you just don't happen to like it very much.

To do this, launch your Terminal (located in /Applications/Utilities/) and type the following:

sudo pico /etc/hostconfig

This will open up your hostconfig file, which tells OS X what processes to launch at startup. Scroll down the hostconfig file and find the line that reads SPOTLIGHT=-YES- and change it to SPOTLIGHT=-NO-. Close and save the file. If you don't know how to use pico, type man pico to read over it's man pages first. If you want to remove Spotlight from the menu bar, remove the file "Search.bundle" from the folder /System/Library/CoreServices, but keep it around somewhere in case you change your mind. When you reboot the computer Spotlight will not load.

If you ever want to re-enable Spotlight just go back through these steps and change NO back to YES and put "Search.bundle" back where it belongs.

Why would anyone want to remove Spotlight? According to MacFixIt, "We continue to cover an issue where Mac OS X 10.4's Spotlight function consumes inordinate amounts of processor time, resulting in slower overall system performance or seemingly complete systems stalls." 

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There's a very detailed, Terminal-intensive and (imho) somewhat just plain crazy and risky hack over at Mac OS X Hints that shows you how...
 

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Michael

Even easier than using CLI editors

From Terminal, this perl one-liner is all which is needed (will make a .orig backup file of the original):

sudo perl -pi'.orig' -e 's/SPOTLIGHT=-YES-/SPOTLIGHT=-NO-/' /etc/hostconfig

December 29 2005 at 6:17 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
paul

for those who don't want to use vi or pico, if you have TextWrangler or BBEdit (and you installed the command line tools) you can use those as well. In a Terminal window: bbedit /etc/hostconfig edit /etc/hostconfig

September 08 2005 at 5:03 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Anthony Graham

You can drag your hard disk or home folder into the Privacy window in Spotlight preferences to achieve a similar effect.

August 17 2005 at 1:47 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Paul

If this is really so easy, couldn't somebody who knows what it's all about write a little application to switch the monster on and off at will?

August 12 2005 at 9:12 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
kim

you know I don't see spotlight in my hostconfig list. I am scrolling down using the down arrow. the last thing in my list is VPNSERVER=-NO- and before that on the list is CORDUMPS=-NO- There are only 3 items that say YES, none of them being SPOTLIGHT, the rest say AUTOMATIC, or NO. I'm using GNU 1.2.4. Comments Please.

August 02 2005 at 8:59 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
KB

THANKS!!!! Worked like a charm ! I followed Tom Mango's directions and it was easy, easy easy to be rid of this crappy feature. I too was noticing a lot of slow downs AND I had times when anywhere I clicked on the screen it opened up the Spotlight window.

July 31 2005 at 12:22 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
pfeester

Worked for me! My Powerbook 1.67 is MUCH snappier now! BUT, the basic command+F Find command yields no results now, for any search...is this a byproduct of turning Spotlight off?

July 12 2005 at 6:06 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Mike

For the two guys/gals that had trouble not finding it, you need to use the down arrow to see the rest of the list, its second from the end on my system.

July 03 2005 at 3:16 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Antonio Butcher

Re: above comment - Have you even tried it? That info is pretty straightforward, and the terminal is far from DOS

July 02 2005 at 9:10 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Matt

Uh...scuse my innocence as a NONCOMMANDLINE GURU...I'm a MAC USER you see.... So where do you get that Spotlight is supposed to show up in the terminal, I typed in vi /etc/hostconfig as well and guess what, I don't see anything but a bunch of mumbojumbo almost the same as the previous comment, and no spotlight anywhere. I'm just a simple mac user who uses google to discover how to undo any stupid things Apple does...like SPOTLIGHT. And one who's always said "if I have to use a dos-like terminal thingy to work in my computer it's not worth doing"...well you guys are proving me right here, if yer gonna give instructions about command-line crap then PLEASE give a blow by blow and don't just expect that anyone is gonna know what the heck you programmers are talking about.

June 16 2005 at 5:33 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
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