Leopard Only: Remove the Spotlight Icon From the Menu Bar

There are some things that people don't like about the Mac OS. One of those things is the inability of the user to remove the spotlight icon from the menu bar. I could understand this if you're working on a 12" screen and use something like QuickSilver instead. There's four ways to do the same thing. Each of the four are detailed below.



While I would love to say that there's no risk in doing any of these, there is a chance that something could go wrong when you use any one of these methods. I'm not responsible if something does go wrong. By reading the text of this post, you agree to these terms.

On the other hand, if something does go wrong, please feel free to email me: mactipper@gmail.com.

Finally, these methods are only tested to be compatible with Mac OSX Leopard.



Do it by hand.

This is probably the worst way of doing it (besides pulling out the hard drive and using a magnetized needle.)

Go to /System/Library/Coreservices/Spotlight.app. Then, right click on Spotlight.app and select "Show Package Contents". Then, navigate to ./Contents/MacOS/ and rename the "spotlight" executable to something else.

Unfortunately, you'll need to change the permissions of the spotlight executable to rename it. You'll then need to repair permissions. This is why this is the worst method.

Once you've renamed the spotlight executable, open up activity monitor and quit the "Spotlight" process and the "SystemUIServer" process.



Using Onyx

If you're a fan of the system modification tool Onyx, then you can use Onyx to remove the spotlight icon. Go to Paramatars>Spotlight and use the Hide/Show buttons to hide and show the spotlight icon from the menu bar.

[Via]


Terminal Commands

You can do this really easily with two commands, one to hide the spotlight icon:

sudo cp -f '/System/Library/CoreServices/Spotlight.app/Contents/MacOS/Spotlight' '/System/Library/CoreServices/Spotlight.app/Contents/MacOS/Spotlight 2'; sudo rm '/System/Library/CoreServices/Spotlight.app/Contents/MacOS/Spotlight'; killall Spotlight; killall SystemUIServer

And one to show it:

sudo cp -f '/System/Library/CoreServices/Spotlight.app/Contents/MacOS/Spotlight 2' '/System/Library/CoreServices/Spotlight.app/Contents/MacOS/Spotlight'; sudo rm '/System/Library/CoreServices/Spotlight.app/Contents/MacOS/Spotlight 2' ; killall SystemUIServer

Use an applescript just to show/hide it.

Taking the two terminal commands from before, I wrote an applescript to show and hide the spotlight icon. You can download it by clicking on this link.


By using one of these four methods, it's quite easy to find the best way for you to get rid of the spotlight icon in your menu bar. As I mentioned earlier, these methods are only tested in Leopard and probably do not work in Tiger.