Disabling Spotlight

I feel sorry for the Apple developers who worked on Spotlight. I'm sure they put a lot of effort into it, and likely think it's a great feature. I suppose it must be disappointing that so many of us don't use it and don't want it even running. It can really bog down your machine when you are doing things like copying down a lot of files or moving things around; if you aren't going to use it anyway, why waste those cpu cycles and the disk space for the index?

Indeed. So let's get rid of it, shall we?

The first step is to become root. You can do everything with "sudo", but we have a few steps here, so it's easiest to start with "sudo su -". Give your ordinary password, and you have a root prompt.

To disable Spotlight from starting up at boot, edit /etc/hostconfig and change the Spotlight line:

 SPOTLIGHT=-NO-
 

For each disk drive, turn off Spotlight indexing:

 mdutil -i off /
 mdutil -i off /myotherdrive
 

Note that you'll see errors if the disk is very busy when you do that. Wait till the disk activity stops and try again.

Then run:

 mdutil -E /
 mdutil -E /myotherdrive
 

If there's any "mdimport" running in Activity Monitor or ps, kill it.

This gets rid of the index, but doesn't remove the .Spotlight directory, so:

  cd /
  rm -rf .Spotlight*
  cd /myotherdrive
  rm -rf .Spotlight*
 

Reboot after all this and you shouldn't be bothered by Spotlight again.

Some web sites have suggested using the System Preferences > Spotlight > Privacy tab but apparently that can cause other problems.

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Comments




Sun Jan 28 20:40:59 2007: Subject:   anonymous
Thank you!



That helped me ALLOT!



Sun Feb 4 05:34:17 2007: Subject:   anonymous
Spotless also does the same thing. It has a small shareware fee:



http://www.fixamacsoftware.com/software/spot/index.php



Wed Aug 22 22:57:29 2007: Subject:   anonymous
don't get me wrong, its a good feature for most cases, but it's great to have to way to disable it.






Tue Nov 20 22:24:41 2007: Subject:   TonyLawrence
On 10.5 Leopard, it's much. much better and I use it all the time:


http://aplawrence.com/MacOSX/leopard_spotlight.htm






Tue Jun 3 14:49:17 2008: Subject:   Shaun


Thank you. Had to use sudo as I can't recall the root PW.



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