Comments on: 10.6.2 Caused an Empty Menu Bar if Spotlight icon was disabled

By: xi

xi — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 13:16:48 +0000

I disabled spotlight indexing service and removed its icon from menu bar before, now the indexing service is back and I can search in finder.But its icon doesn’t come back and the shortcut to activate spotlight (control+space) doesn’t work as well….

P.S. Your Search.bundle backup only contains a folder /Contents/Resources/German.lproj. Is that right?

Thx!

By: dataquent

dataquent — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 04:10:53 +0000

How to Disable Spotlight and remove Spotlight icon from menu.

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20091030173117381

To turn Spotlight Indexing off and on in Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, and to remove the Menu Bar Icon, follow these steps…

To turn Spotlight Indexing off in open Terminal and run this command:
sudo mdutil -a -i off
To turn Spotlight Indexing back on, repeat the above command, but change off to on. To remove the menu bar icon, run this Terminal command:
sudo chmod 600 /System/Library/CoreServices/Search.bundle/Contents/MacOS/Search
You’ll then to restart the menu bar with killall SystemUIServer to see the icon vanish.

By: Kirill

Kirill — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 20:33:09 +0000

If you want to still be able to keep all of the functionality of the menu bar spotlight search but have white space for the spotlight in the menu bar you can replace the icon image file with a blank one or your own custom icon.
The image file is
/System/Library/CoreServices/Search.bundle/Contents/Resources/MDSearchMenuIcon.pdf

Steps:
1. Navigate to folder
cd /System/Library/CoreServices/Search.bundle/Contents/Resources

2. Open folder
open .

3. Make copy for backup
4. Give yourself read write permission on parent folder and image file
5. Open image in Adobe Illustrator
6. Modify icon to liking
7. Save
8. Restart SystemUIServer

killall SystemUIServer

By: David

David — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 08:33:48 +0000

Great! That fixed it. Thanks!
Now, how do I disable spotlight again?