macosspotlight
I just upgraded to Yosemite for OS X and now whenever I use Spotlight Search there's this giant message in the middle of my screen (beneath the search bar) that starts off "In addition to searching your Mac, Spotlight now shows suggestions from the Internet, iTunes, the App Store, etc etc etc etc."
How can I get rid of this? I have used it many times but it continues to show this information as if it were the first time I had used it since installing Yosemite.
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
Show the status of Spotlight indexing for a volume
mdutil -s /Volumes/volumename
↪︎
/Volumes/volumename:
Indexing enabled.
Here are some other Spotlight terminal commands
This comment thread suggests that there is not a great way to get an estimated time to completion.
Best Answer
It's supposed to disappear after you use Spotlight three times, but you can force it to disappear by setting the use count to three and setting
showedFTEto true: