Disabling spotlight in Mac OSX 10.5 Leopard
While the new spotlight in Leopard is much more powerful than it was in Tiger, there are still those of us that would rather not have our system eating up system resources. Unfortunately, adding “SPOTLIGHT=-NO-” to /etc/hostconfig no longer does anything.
To disable spotlight (non-destructively), open up Terminal.app (/Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app), and execute the following two commands:
(This will disable the spotlight indexing)
(This will remove spotlight from your menu bar)
If at any time you want to re-enable spotlight, simply run disk utility, and have it fix permissions on your boot drive.
Disclaimers:
* You should probably reboot after running those two commands.
* Doing this will disable any features that explicitly depend on spotlight, such as searching mail content.
* I believe that disabling spotlight will break Time Machine. If this is wrong, or there’s a way around it, let me know!
Tags: disable, Leopard, Mac OSX, spotlight, time machine
March 25th, 2008 at 10:30 pm
what is the code to turn indexing back on?
March 26th, 2008 at 7:36 am
The easiest way to turn on indexing is to just run disk utility, as I said above ;)
If you want to do it by hand, run the above commands replacing 0000 with 755.
May 25th, 2008 at 12:41 pm
No, no and no!
Do not change system file permissions! To disable Spotlight in Leopard, just do the following:
sudo launchctl unload /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist
sudo launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist
(first line stops it, second line tells the system to disable it permanently)
To reenable it:
sudo launchctl load /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist
sudo launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist
(same meaning but reenabling instead of disabling)
That’s all