MacOS – How to hide Spotlight in menu bar but keep the ⌘Space keyboard shortcut

high sierrakeyboardmacosmenu barspotlight

I want to hide spotlight from the menu bar

I never click this button.

So I followed the instructions here and used this code to change the Spotlight file in some way:

sudo perl -pi -e 's|(\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x47\x40\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00)\x42\x40(\x00\x00\x80\x3f\x00\x00\x70\x42)|$1\x00\x00$2|sg' Spotlight

It hid the menu-bar icon, but it also disabled the ⌘+space keyboard shortcut that I use a lot.

Is there a way to hide the icon in the menubar but allowing the keyboard shortcut to work?

I just saw this other question asking the same thing but for Yosemite.

The accepted answer doesn't work for me on High Sierra, and all the other answers suggest using third-party tools like Bartender which I don't want to do.

Best Answer

The easiest way I know to do this is with a third party app like Bartender (https://www.macbartender.com). The app is used to hide pretty much any menu bar icon, and has a lot of great features. It's kind of a "must have" for and Mac Power User.

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How to create a menu shortcut which involves the delete key

You can edit the property list that stores the shortcuts directly. For example open ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.AddressBook.plist with TextMate or TextWrangler, and add:

<key>NSUserKeyEquivalents</key>
<dict>
    <key>Delete Card</key>
    <string>~@&#x0008;</string>
</dict>

The shortcut strings are documented in http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~jrus/Site/Cocoa%20Text%20System.html.

MacOS – How to hide the Spotlight icon on Yosemite, but keep the Spotlight functionality

So I got fed up with this and decided to fix it the hard way.

I found out where Spotlight initializes the status bar item, and I just patched the status bar size to zero. This requires editing the Spotlight binary. (Note that Search.bundle is just the little stub that gets loaded into SystemUIServer to allow Spotlight.app to control the status bar).

You'll have to use the Terminal to execute some commands.

For OS X 10.10 (Yosemite):

cd /System/Library/CoreServices/Spotlight.app/Contents/MacOS
sudo cp Spotlight Spotlight.bak
sudo perl -pi -e 's|(\x48\xb8\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00)\x42\x40(\x48\x89\x47\x10\x48\xB8\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x36\x40)|$1\x00\x00$2|sg' Spotlight
cmp -l Spotlight Spotlight.bak 
sudo codesign -f -s - Spotlight
sudo killall Spotlight

For OS X 10.11 (El Capitan):

cd /System/Library/CoreServices/Spotlight.app/Contents/MacOS
sudo cp Spotlight Spotlight.bak
sudo perl -pi -e 's|(\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x47\x40\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00)\x42\x40(\x00\x00\x80\x3f\x00\x00\x70\x42)|$1\x00\x00$2|sg' Spotlight
cmp -l Spotlight Spotlight.bak 
sudo codesign -f -s - Spotlight
sudo killall Spotlight

The cmp -l line should print out something like the following:

248855   0 102
248856   0 100

If it prints out nothing, then the patch failed. I have tested this on OS X 10.10.3 (Yosemite) and OS X 10.11.5 (El Capitan; SIP off).

What this patch is doing is replacing the status bar width value (36.0, or 0000000000004240 in floating-point hex) with zero, so that when the status bar item is loaded it simply renders with a width of zero, i.e. it is invisible and doesn't affect the layout of the bar.

Screenshot before doing this hack:

Screenshot after doing this hack:

Menu icon is gone but Cmd+Space continues to work.

To revert, do the following:

cd /System/Library/CoreServices/Spotlight.app/Contents/MacOS
sudo mv Spotlight.bak Spotlight
sudo killall Spotlight

Best Answer

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MacOS – How to hide the Spotlight icon on Yosemite, but keep the Spotlight functionality

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