How to completely disable Spotlight

Mar 22, 2007 - 35 Comments

spacer 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.

Related articles:

  • Disable Spotlight in Mac OS X 10.5
  • How to Disable (or Enable) Spotlight in Mac OS X Lion
  • mdworker – What is mdworker?
  • Disable Spotlight in Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard
Posted by: OSXDaily in How to, Mac OS X, Tips & Tricks

35 Comments

» Comments RSS Feed

  1. hmills says:
    March 22, 2007 at 11:27 pm

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

    Reply
    • James says:
      April 27, 2011 at 1:37 pm

      THANKS! so nice to get my cpu back. Some simple minded users might not understand why not to use spotlight, here is why:

      For two days my machine has been CRAWLING, nearly unusable. Turns out that it was all spotlight trying to index a little over 20TB of email backups on an array I had just connected. For people like myself who work with large RAID arrays containing large amounts of data Spotlight will nearly disable your system.

      Reply
    • pb says:
      October 15, 2011 at 12:42 am

      … you want to completely eradicate spotlight from your machine as it -continuously- screws up your back up system.

      Use find(1) if you want to search for something.

      Using a mac for 10 years and never had the use for something like spotlight.

      Reply
  2. anon says:
    March 23, 2007 at 5:52 am

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

    Reply
  3. Mac Info » Blog Archive » Jak vypnout/zapnout Spotlight says:
    June 14, 2007 at 12:09 pm

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

    Reply
  4. Ladeda says:
    September 3, 2007 at 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

    Reply
  5. mike says:
    November 9, 2007 at 11:55 am

    also, quicksilver is much better

    Reply
  6. OS X Leopard: Enable/Disable Spotlight | Technipages says:
    November 26, 2007 at 9:43 pm

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

    Reply
  7. Yost says:
    December 21, 2007 at 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?

    Reply
  8. Leopard langsam? Spotlight kann schuld sein | macophilia says:
    January 16, 2008 at 3:15 pm

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

    Reply
  9. indroo says:
    February 5, 2008 at 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.

    Reply
  10. What Haveyou says:
    December 11, 2008 at 3:12 am

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

    Because it’s a piece of dook. 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?

    Reply
    • Phil Hawkins says:
      August 30, 2011 at 11:53 am

      AMEN!!

      Reply
  11. WTF? says:
    December 12, 2008 at 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?

    Reply
  12. What Ever says:
    January 14, 2009 at 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?

    Reply
  13. Ludwig says:
    March 6, 2009 at 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.

    Reply
  14. Fourthletter says:
    April 2, 2009 at 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 ?

    Reply
  15. tuning -> 关闭spotlight « Alin’s Blog says:
    April 21, 2009 at 6:00 pm

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

    Reply
  16. franz says:
    June 1, 2009 at 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.

    Reply
  17. Training for a Mini Triathlon says:
    June 20, 2009 at 3:43 pm

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

    Reply
  18. hubionmac.com » Spotlight deaktivieren says:
    June 24, 2009 at 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): [...]

    Reply
  19. josh says:
    August 20, 2009 at 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?

    Reply
    • Matti G says:
      June 23, 2010 at 8:16 am

      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?

      I did the same thing with the plist files trying to improve the audio latency with GarageBand. Yes, and I put them back and now I can’t get Spotlight working again either.

      Is there a simple fix?

      Reply
  20. mdworker – What is mdworker? - OS X Daily says:
    September 14, 2009 at 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 [...]

    Reply
  21. dougtheslug says:
    September 23, 2009 at 2:22 pm

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

    Reply
  22. machinehead says:
    October 24, 2009 at 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?

    Reply
  23. goran says:
    October 28, 2009 at 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?

    Reply
    • MacNewbie says:
      August 21, 2010 at 12:28 pm

      I’m getting the same error message. Any further thoughts on what that means and what I need to do? Thanks.

      Reply
  24. Darren says:
    February 11, 2010 at 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.

    Reply
  25. John Wheater says:
    February 18, 2010 at 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.

    Reply
  26. John Wheater says:
    February 18, 2010 at 10:38 pm

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

    Reply
  27. John Wheater says:
    February 19, 2010 at 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’

    Reply
  28. Ricardo says:
    May 24, 2010 at 6:36 am

    Im trying to disable it but when I type sudo nano /etc/hostconfig doesnt appear in my list SPOTLIGHT, just the following options

    AFPSERVER=-NO-
    AUTHSERVER=-NO-
    TIMESYNC=-NO-
    QTSSERVER=-NO-

    (mine one is MACBOOK PRO 10.6.3)
    what do i do to find spotlight?
    tks
    Ricardo

    Reply
  29. boo says:
    October 18, 2010 at 2:28 pm

    I hate to disable it completely, but it keeps crashing on usb flash drive usage. I have tried it on over 30 separate macs.
    Terrible flaw in the system I think, and yet there is no way to completely disable indexing on flash drives, because every flash drive will read differently when plugged in, so the privacy tab is useless in that regard.
    oh well, it’s not disabled, hope this helps.

    Reply
  30. 5 widely unknown Mac OS X features. | Montana Flynn says:
    May 11, 2011 at 5:48 pm

    [...] turned into spotlight. Spotlight is great at finding stuff (if you have a powerful computer if not, turn it off since it is a memory hog. But what if I don’t want to search through every folder or scroll [...]

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Click here to cancel reply.

Previous: Awaken – an Alarm Clock and timer for your Mac
Next: 15 Ways to Customize your Mac Desktop

 

Shop for Apple & Mac Deals on Amazon.comspacer

Subscribe to OSXDaily

spacer spacer spacer spacer
Follow @OSXDaily

Shared on Facebook

Shop at Amazon

Ad

OSXDaily on Facebook

Related searches:
spotlight disable search system leopard
gipoco.com is neither affiliated with the authors of this page nor responsible for its contents. This is a safe-cache copy of the original web site.