Terminal Tips: Disable Spotlight in menu bar

Why could setting your HD to private be "dangerous around system update time"?

I'm almost afraid to chime in. I hate spotlight in my menu bar. I'm always scrolling over it with my mouse and the window pops open when I don't want or expect it to. (I hate the way spotlight handles the "show all" part, too. It worked better for me in Tiger.) Now, if I need to do a search, I use the search in a Finder window.

And, in order to keep from accidentally messing up the command for the terminal, I just copied what he had up there into it.

Nobody yell at me.

I'd put that down to coincidence. Very little that you change in the software would cause the hard drive to fail to the point where a replacement is needed.

This is probably the worst tip ever published.

Go to the spotlight preferences and change it their!
If you don't want the indexing, set your entire HDD to private, and it will IMMEDIATELY stop all indexing forever(on that drive of course)...

This could be dangerous around system update time...
PLUS it would most likely be reset, when permissions are repaired...

Leave Spotlight alone!!!

Ugh hate to have to keep scrollign past the ugh ugh Obama plug to read your fine site.
Not all Mac users are liberal Democraps.

What about just adding Macintosh HD to the list of Spotlight exceptions?

p.s. you are all insane, trying to disable one of the MAIN reasons to use Mac OS X

That is a lot of dangerous work for something that can be done with one mouse click in the peference pane for Spotlight. All the way at the bottom it says: "Spotlight menu keyboard shortcut." Just uncheck it and you are done.

If you want to kill spotlight completely, just go to terminal and type:

sudo defaults write /System/Library/LauchAgents/com.apple.spotlight KeepAlive false

You will have to enter your Administrative password.
Then you can kill the process with Activity Viewer. The above command prevents OS X from re-starting Spotlight when it detects it has quit.
To reverse, just type true instead of false.

Why would anyone uninstall one of the best applications implemented in the mac OS. In Leopard Spotlight works wonderfully, I bet the same guy is installing Quicksilver because someone has told him that's the way to go, when Spotlight is so useful and easy to use...

Nevermind I am starting to think that too many PC guys are switching and starting to mess up with everything...