MacOS – Removing spotlight icon from menu bar persistently

macosmenu barspotlight

I tried to remove spotlight form the menu bar with the following trick:

sudo chmod 600 /System/Library/CoreServices/Search.bundle/Contents/MacOS/Search
killall SystemUIServer

Unfortunately if I repair disk permissions and reboot at some point (or just simply reboot some people tell me), the annoying spotlight thing is back in the menu bar.

I don't want to disable spotlight, just to take off the damn magnifying glass from the menu bar persistently. Is there a way the works better than the one I presented above?

Best Answer

This works at least up to 10.9.2.

To disable:

sudo mv /System/Library/CoreServices/Search.bundle /System/Library/CoreServices/Search.bundle.bak
killall SystemUIServer

To re-enable:

sudo mv /System/Library/CoreServices/Search.bundle.bak /System/Library/CoreServices/Search.bundle
killall SystemUIServer
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