How do I remove the Spotlight icon from the Mac OS X menubar?
Note, I don't want to disable Spotlight (I use it). I just want to remove the icon.
How do I remove the Spotlight icon from the Mac OS X menubar?
Note, I don't want to disable Spotlight (I use it). I just want to remove the icon.
OK just tested this in SL and it worked, icon was removed but spotlight was still working in Finder:
$ cd /System/Library/CoreServices/
$ sudo mv Search.bundle/ Search2.bundle/
Now restart SystemUIServer, the icon is gone, Spotlight still works. To get Spotlight icon back:
$ sudo mv Search2.bundle/ Search.bundle/
And restart SystemUIServer again...
mv: cannot move 'Search.bundle/' to 'Search2.bundle/': Operation not permitted
How about doing:
sudo chmod 600 /System/Library/CoreServices/Search.bundle/Contents/MacOS/Search
In this way, the Search binary is still read/writable for root and can thus be updated by SoftwareUpdate. Making it non-readable for other users will prevent it from being launched!
killall SystemUIServer
to apply this without rebooting
chmod: Unable to change file mode on /System/Library/CoreServices/Search.bundle/Contents/MacOS/Search: Operation not permitted
on 10.14 Mojave
Commented
Oct 23, 2018 at 6:43
sudo chmod 666 /System/Library/CoreServices/Search.bundle/Contents/MacOS/Search
Commented
Aug 21, 2019 at 13:23
Snow Leopard and Leopard handle the Spotlight menu very differently. Under Leopard, the Spotlight menu is an application on its own rights. That application is launched by launchd. The menu may thus easily be disabled by modifying the appropriate launchd configuration file.
Snow Leopard seems to have revered to the Tiger way of running the Spotlight menu. The menu itself lives in /System/Library/CoreServices/Search.bundle . It is automatically loaded by SystemUIServer.app which is also host to menu extras.
While there are preference files allowing us to disable menu extras, I can't seem to find any way to disable Search.bundle
The previously suggested option of renaming Search.bundle does work, but comes at a high risk. A future system update may try to update Search.bundle and end up with a partial bundle file. Thus SystemUIServer will crash trying to load that bundle. To be safe, one would need to restore the bundle before each update. Hardly a desirable solution.
Moreover renaming Search.bundle or removing read rights affects all users on the machine. A per-user preferences as available under Leopard would be preferable.
If you want to still be able to keep all of the functionality of the menu bar spotlight search but have white space for the spotlight in the menu bar you can replace the icon image file with a blank one or your own custom icon. The image file is
/System/Library/CoreServices/Search.bundle/Contents/Resources/MDSearchMenuIcon.pdf
cd /System/Library/CoreServices/Search.bundle/Contents/Resources
open .
killall SystemUIServer
Quick and easy is to use the free utility OnyX.
Also, I'm using LaunchBar set to use a keyboard shortcut for Spotlight search in LaunchBar (set in LB prefs).
This also stops keyboard shortcuts for Spotlight, but not in Finder searching.
For macOS Ventura 13, Sonoma 14
Change Control Centre settings on Mac