Filed under: OS, Software, Hacks, How-tos
Tiger Tips: Hate Spotlight? Turn it off
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 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/hostconfigThis 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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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Thomas Mango said 4:18PM on 6-16-2005
OR if you simply don't like pico...
vi /etc/hostconfig, x, x, x, i, N, O, esc, :, w, q, enter
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Dan Siercks said 4:18PM on 6-16-2005
And remember, its no longer UW's pico, but the GNU's nano. I'm happy, as I always had to catch myself from trying to use nano on 10.3 machines.
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Jay said 4:18PM on 6-16-2005
You probably want to free up the space used by the index, too, so:
mdutil -i off /
mdutil -E /
Too, if you don't feel like rebooting, just kill any running mds and mdimport processes.
Also, when editing system files, I would strongly recommend using an editor that doesn't do in-place editing like pico and nano, but instead makes a copy and works from the copy, like vi or emacs. In the event of a program crash, nano/pico will attempt to save your current work in a file with the .save extension, and will in theory leave your original file untouched. But when dealing with system files Id still rather know I my program was working with it's own copy of the file, as well as its own buffer.
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AntiVirus Clinic Blog said 5:46PM on 8-10-2005
Mac OS X more icon bubleling icon, i like that
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Matt said 5:25AM on 6-16-2005
"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."
Really?? When I do that I get:
GNU nano 1.2.4 File: /etc/hostconfig
##
# /etc/hostconfig
##
# This file is maintained by the system control panels
##
# Network configuration
HOSTNAME=-AUTOMATIC-
ROUTER=-AUTOMATIC-
# Services
AFPSERVER=-NO-
AUTHSERVER=-NO-
AUTOMOUNT=-YES-
CUPS=-YES-
IPFORWARDING=-NO-
IPV6=-YES-
MAILSERVER=-AUTOMATIC-
NETINFOSERVER=-AUTOMATIC-
[ Read 29 lines ]
^G Get Help ^O WriteOut ^R Read File ^Y Prev Page ^K Cut Text ^C Cur Pos
^X Exit ^J Justify ^W Where Is ^V Next Page ^U UnCut Txt ^T To Spell
Can't say as I see SPOTLIGHT anywhere. This suggestion does not work.
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Matt said 5:36AM on 6-16-2005
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.
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Antonio Butcher said 10:10PM on 7-02-2005
Re: above comment - Have you even tried it? That info is pretty straightforward, and the terminal is far from DOS
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Mike said 3:35AM on 7-03-2005
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.
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pfeester said 6:07PM on 7-12-2005
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?
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KB said 9:57PM on 7-31-2005
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.
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kim said 9:00PM on 8-02-2005
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.
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Paul said 10:18PM on 8-16-2005
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?
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Anthony Graham said 10:55AM on 8-19-2005
You can drag your hard disk or home folder into the Privacy window in Spotlight preferences to achieve a similar effect.
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paul said 5:10PM on 9-08-2005
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
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Michael said 6:17PM on 12-29-2005
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
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