Disabling Spotlight
I checked out the wiki for it but for some reason it did not work. SPOTLIGHT wasnt even listed in the file to disable it. Can someone walk me through it?
- Primary Author
- @minibuu Published 2008-04-01
- Collection
- Leopard 10.5
- Archival Footprint
- 2,588 historical reads · 1 curated field notes (from 2 dispatches) · 2008-04-01 – 2008-04-02
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- @minibuu@bhast2
I checked out the wiki for it but for some reason it did not work. SPOTLIGHT wasnt even listed in the file to disable it. Can someone walk me through it?
Synthesized Community Field Notes
1 technical responses curated from 2 original dispatches
Disabling Spotlight
Launch Terminal and type the following: sudo nano /etc/hostconfig
Navigate using the arrow keys down the following entry: SPOTLIGHT=-YES-
Change SPOTLIGHT=-YES- to SPOTLIGHT=-NO-
Save /etc/hostconfig by hitting Control-O and the return key, next hit Control-X to exit the nano editor
Next, you’ll want to disable the index by typing the following in the Terminal:
mdutil -i off /
And to erase the current Spotlight index, type: mdutil -E /
That’s pretty much it, on your next reboot, Spotlight will be completely disabled.
Re-Enable Spotlight
If you want to enable Spotlight again, follow the same steps as above, but change SPOTLIGHT=-NO- to SPOTLIGHT=-YES-
and then type mdutil -i on / in the Terminal
Reboot, and Spotlight is back as usual