spotlight
How can I remove dictionary results from Spotlight results? I've typed "chrome" into Spotlight and looked up chrome in the Dictionary one too many times, and now opening Chrome takes an extra keystroke.
I've seen comments about defaults write com.apple.spotlight DictionaryLookupEnabled NO, but this doesn't seem to work with Mac OS 10.8, even after a sudo killall -u _spotlight.
Finally, I found a hack! I wrote a blog post about this which you can find here (in Chinese).
These are the key steps:
Open the file with Xcode:
~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.spotlight.plist
If you do not have this file, change the order System Preferences → Spotlight which will cause the OS to create it.
Within the orderedItems node, add a Dictionary item as follows:
.plist file.Open System Preferences → Spotlight, you will find a blank entry, this is what we had added above. You can drag it like other entries to change the order as you like.
You are done! Now type a word in spotlight and see what happened.
⌃⌘D or tapping with three fingers doesn't work for some reason, but you can show a look up popover from the context menu.
Best Answer
TinkerTool also allows you to change this preference via a GUI (rather than a Terminal command). It's under Applications > Spotlight:
Note that you will have to log out and back in for the changes to take effect.