A while back, I was looking for a way to remove the Spotlight icon from my menubar. I rarely if ever use menu icons, and wanted to reduce the clutter.

The only guides I was able to find recommended chmodding Spotlight.app to 000, to prevent it from being run. I did this, and was happy for a while, but this approach has a number of problems.

It’s unreliable. After OS updates or running repair permissions¹, it’s back. But the main problem is more severe: launchd tries to relaunch it continuously. This is a much larger problem than it might seem. While I don’t think the system resources this consumes are significant, it does cause launchd to complain incessantly in your log files - every few seconds - which can eat up your disk space at an alarming rate.

I knew there had to be a better way, so I went looking. It turns out that launchd has normal .plist configuration files which tells it what services to launch. The relevant file for Spotlight is in /System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.Spotlight.plist.

To completely disable Spotlight, this is what you need to do:

1. In Finder, select Go ▸ Go To Folder (⌘⇧G)
2. Enter /System/Library/LaunchAgents; click Go.
3. Download my copy of com.apple.Spotlight.plist.
4. Drag the file from wherever you downloaded it to the /System/Library/LaunchAgents window.
5. Click “Authenticate” when prompted; enter your password; confirm that you want to replace the old file.
6. Reboot.

Spotlight is gone for good, and I noticed a significant reduction in the time it takes to log in.

1. Repair permissions is voodoo, and never fixes anything, but
   people do it anyway.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 30th, 2008 at 7:39 pm and is filed under Apple. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.