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How to completely disable Spotlight

March 22nd, 2007 - How to, Mac OS X, Tips & Tricks

We’re big fans of Spotlight here at OS X Daily, but we realize it’s not everyones cup of tea. If you’re someone who dislikes Spotlight enough to want it disabled completely then this is the guide for you. What you’ll need is some basic knowledge of the command line and a command line text editor (we’ll use nano in this example, perhaps the easiest). Note that some other Mac OS X features and programs are based on Spotlight’s search abilities, therefore some applications could behave abnormally if you disable Spotlight, particularly in search functions.

Disabling Spotlight

  1. Launch Terminal and type the following: sudo nano /etc/hostconfig
  2. Navigate using the arrow keys down the following entry: SPOTLIGHT=-YES-
  3. Change SPOTLIGHT=-YES- to SPOTLIGHT=-NO-
  4. Save /etc/hostconfig by hitting Control-O and the return key, next hit Control-X to exit the nano editor
  5. Next, you’ll want to disable the index by typing the following in the Terminal:
    mdutil -i off /
  6. And to erase the current Spotlight index, type: mdutil -E /
  7. That’s pretty much it, on your next reboot, Spotlight will be completely disabled.

Re-Enable Spotlight

  1. If you want to enable Spotlight again, follow the same steps as above, but change SPOTLIGHT=-NO- to SPOTLIGHT=-YES-
  2. and then type mdutil -i on / in the Terminal
  3. Reboot, and Spotlight is back as usual

Disable Spotlight in OS X 10.5

To turn off Spotlight in Leopard, use this trick:

Move these two files to another safe location and then reboot your mac

/System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.Spotlight.plist
/System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist

Re-enable Spotlight by moving those files back to their original location, reboot, and Spotlight will work again.

Repair a Broken Spotlight

Is Spotlight broken and not working for you? Read our fix broken Spotlight guide.

Posted by: Editor

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Comments:

Comments: 30

Comment from hmills
Time: March 22, 2007, 11:27 pm

why would you possibly want to turn off spotlight, the best feature in osx??

Comment from anon
Time: March 23, 2007, 5:52 am

Speaking of spotlight, I cannot wait until mdfind is more powerful.

Pingback from Mac Info » Blog Archive » Jak vypnout/zapnout Spotlight
Time: June 14, 2007, 12:09 pm

[...] Zdroj: OSXDaily  [...]

Comment from Ladeda
Time: September 3, 2007, 5:26 am

You might want to turn off spotlight for a couple of reasons.
1. performance, removing spotlight overhead on a low-end system
2. privacy, making it more difficult for a script to harvest personal information

Comment from mike
Time: November 9, 2007, 11:55 am

also, quicksilver is much better

Pingback from OS X Leopard: Enable/Disable Spotlight | Technipages
Time: November 26, 2007, 9:43 pm

[...] For instructions on how to do this in Mac OS X Leopard, see How to completely disable Spotlight. [...]

Comment from Yost
Time: December 21, 2007, 9:20 am

So I’ve gone through with this and for some reason spotlight just won’t go away. I’ve done it for the root drive and also my two external partitions, just modifying the / on the end to a /volumes/etc. It is still in my menu bar and when I accidentally click on it mds kicks in and starts taking up 80-90% of my cpu power. After I kill mds it’s all fine, but it’s bothersome to think that I didn’t actually get rid of it. My /etc/hostconfig reads NO for spotlight upon opening. Any suggestions?

Pingback from Leopard langsam? Spotlight kann schuld sein | macophilia
Time: January 16, 2008, 3:15 pm

[...] Angeblich soll diese Lösung unter Leopard nicht funktionieren, hier wird eine andere Lösung diskutiert. Bei mir hat sie funktioniert. [...]

Comment from indroo
Time: February 5, 2008, 10:01 pm

The easy way to disable spotlight is by setting its preference to prevent from searching on certain folder (or HD or external HD if any) on the Privacy Tab and uncheck all category on Search Result tab. It will stop indexing immediatelly.

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Comment from What Haveyou
Time: December 11, 2008, 3:12 am

“why would you possibly want to turn off spotlight, the best feature in osx??”

Because it’s a piece of shit. What is the point of a search function that doesn’t show you WHERE THINGS ARE? I don’t know where Apple gets its designers, but they have to be amongst the biggest morons in professional development. Who else would design a display of search results that doesn’t show a LOCATION with every hit?

Comment from WTF?
Time: December 12, 2008, 5:10 am

>What is the point of a search function that doesn’t show you WHERE THINGS ARE?

Ahem, when you scroll the pointer over an item, it shows you the full path. But yeah, Apple’s designers are idiots and you are the truly brilliant one. Coming from Vista I imagine?

Comment from What Ever
Time: January 14, 2009, 2:04 pm

Right, retard. It makes a lot of sense to have to click on every damned item, one at a time, to see a path. After all, who’d want to quickly scan through a list and skip hits that reside in known irrelevant locations?

Comment from Ludwig
Time: March 6, 2009, 4:53 am

I want to remove it because the shortcuts suck.
Every time I’m in other app and type space command to get to whatever option in the app I use it jumps to stupid spotlight and since I do a lot blind I notice late and have to start over.

Comment from Fourthletter
Time: April 2, 2009, 1:59 pm

Also those of us that keep our houses clean tend to know where files are, after all you save them somewhere, simply label your files correctly and put them in organised folders, in my twenty years of using macs or pcs I have never lost a file or needed to search for it.
Why run with all that overhead for no reason ?

So to get back to the point does adding the main system drive to spotlights privacy list free up as much performance as disabling it in terminal ?

Pingback from tuning -> 关闭spotlight « Alin’s Blog
Time: April 21, 2009, 6:00 pm

[...] How to completely disable Spotlight [...]

Comment from нeвидимкa
Time: May 31, 2009, 2:23 am

Вообще, честно говоря, комментарии тут гораздо прикольнейсамих постов. (Не в обиду автору, конечно :) )

Comment from franz
Time: June 1, 2009, 7:31 am

As interface designer i am allowed to agree, Spotlight totally sucks for some people.
Normally we replicate a lot off apple standards, because they are simple and work.
But with spotlight, i really don’t get the idea, its radically boiled down to a simplicity which is for me totally useless.

Comment from Training for a Mini Triathlon
Time: June 20, 2009, 3:43 pm

I don’t really know why in the world you would want to disable Spotlight, but thanks for the tips.

Pingback from hubionmac.com » Spotlight deaktivieren
Time: June 24, 2009, 4:30 pm

[...] Gerade wenn man eine Festplatte anschließt, auf der Daten unabsichtlich gelöscht wurden und man nun versuchen möchte auf diese Platte eine Datenrettung durchzuführen, startet Spotlight beflissen einen Index-Vorgangang und überschreibt vielleicht dadurch gleich einige der gelöschten Daten: Deshalb diese Anleitung, um Spotlight zu deaktivieren (eigentlich von hier): [...]

Comment from josh
Time: August 20, 2009, 1:52 pm

waah i disabled it in 10.5 by moving the two plist files as above (i just wanted to prevent reindexing during migration assistant) but now that i’ve put them back it’s still not working even though the files are there… any idea what I do now?

Pingback from mdworker – What is mdworker? – OS X Daily
Time: September 14, 2009, 6:18 am

[...] Since mdworker is part of Spotlight, you’ll have to disable Spotlight to disable mdworker. Again, this is not recommended, but if you want to disable mdworker here’s a how-to guide: How to Disable Spotlight [...]

Comment from dougtheslug
Time: September 23, 2009, 2:22 pm

What Ever and What Haveyou rock. WTF? is a goof. So shut the phukk up.

Comment from machinehead
Time: October 24, 2009, 12:08 pm

mdutil -i off /

gives me an error: “could not set indexing status for volume.

also I had to access root prior to this command.

any ideas?

Comment from goran
Time: October 28, 2009, 2:15 am

I had the same error last night. “could not set indexing status for volume.” turned out to be major mess of the directory structure of the hard disk. I’m now restoring from a backup after formatting the hard disk.
I did install the drive patch that came a few days ago. Hmmm, maybe it’s related?

Comment from Darren
Time: February 11, 2010, 7:36 am

I disabled Spotlight and also removed the menu bar icon (Google it if you’re interested). Without all that indexing, I’ve found my drives generally run quieter and cooler.

Comment from John Wheater
Time: February 18, 2010, 10:34 pm

The comments from What Haveyou and WTF seem a bit strict.

If you do you get a ‘Smart Folder’, and can sort the entries by name, type, and date. The whole setup seems most useful, and it’s hard to fault the design.

As for Darren’s “noisier and cooler”, I should think most of us hardly know we’ve got a drive – my 250Gb just provides an infinite amount of space and stays shtum. And I can find any text, anywhere.

You do need to turn off Spotlight sometimes, though. I was very puzzled, on mounting a 16Gb USB stick and dumping the world onto it, to see it ticking away for ever after I’d finished with it. This was the mighty Spotlight patiently repeating all its useful work on a slow device.

That’s what led me here, and thank you all very much.

Comment from John Wheater
Time: February 18, 2010, 10:38 pm

Sorry, should read …If you do you get a ‘Smart Folder’…

Comment from John Wheater
Time: February 19, 2010, 4:27 pm

Help, what’s happening, I meant to say

…If you choose Show All, on seeing the Spotlight results, you get a ‘Smart Folder’

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March 22nd, 2007