Home Forums Mac Software Mac Operating Systems Spotlight and Notifications menu bar items

Does anybody know how to get rid of them?

I've got Notifications turned off, but I can't find a way to turn Spotlight off.

Thanks.

You'll have to spend some money, but Cocktail has an option for doing this. Select the System tab and then select Spotlight.

Thanks, Jon, but that's not what I'm after.

Cocktail offers

• Manage Spotlight indexing
• Erase Spotlight indexes

but I've already got all my volumes set with .metadata_never_index (Thanks, Hal! ).

What I'd like to do is get rid of the two menu bar items, because I never use either function, and barring that, I'd like to turn Spotlight off so, same as when I click on the Notifications icon, it doesn't present me with a pop-up when I click on its icon.

The EC edition of Cocktail DOES give you the ability to hide the menu bar icon. I just checked my copy of it.

Thanks, but even for (40% off) $19 it's not worth it to me.

If Cocktail can do it, sooner or later someone will post some Terminal commands...I hope.

(Curiosity... Both icons or only Spotlight's, and does it actually turn Spotlight off?)

Just figured out how to get rid of Spotlight on my own.

Please tell us! Curious minds want to know...

I'm guessing that if you go to the Privacy tab in Spotlight's preference tab, you can use the "+" to add your startup drive to the list.

You may need to add it again after every Restart.

I held off posting the details because I didn't want to tempt people without being asked.

You've got to think outside of the box on this one, Ira.

(Actually, I posted about Spotlight because a hack I used in Snowy didn't work in El Cap, but I've since learned that the original "Quit SystemUIServer" has morphed into (probably just) "Restart" [but I shut down and started up just to cover all bases].)

I did the job seat of the pants, but here are the Terminal commands that get rid of your Spotlight menu bar icon for good:


Follow those commands with a restart...a complete shutdown if it doesn't work.

and if you run the second command with "Spotlight.app" (no quotes) you apparently turn Spotlight off permanently.

And since the dam has been breached, this command turns Notifications off permanently:


(That command got rid of Notifications's menu bar icon through Yosemite but no longer does.)

and this command turns Gatekeeper off permanently


(I've always seen -bool no or NO, but "not" worked.)