How can I disable Spotlight completely on Mac OS X Lion?
It's using up a lot of resources and I never really use it, so I want to disable it.
The only feature I might want to keep is the icon in the status bar which lets me launch applications. The main feature I want to disable is the indexing every single file on my hard drive. I never use Spotlight to access files, I only use it to launch applications.
Are there any risks in disabling it? Is there an Apple recommended way to disabling it?
How would I re-enable it later on if I want to?
Best Answer
To disable, open Terminal and run
This disables the Launch Daemon that starts and keeps it running. You can also run:
but from looking online in a few places, this may give you an error like 'Spotlight server is disabled'
If you disable though, it will continue to use an old cache, or not work at all. Therefore, the launching applications as you mention will no longer work. It also may break other functions related to the OS, like the Mac App Store (to know whats installed, etc), and LaunchPad.
If you still need an application launcher, you can use applications like LaunchBar and Quicksilver.
After seeing your update (espc. on how to stop it indexing so much), there are two things to check:
Re-enabling would be running
or