Question

How do I remove the Spotlight icon from the Mac OS X menubar?

Please note, I don't want to disable Spotlight (I use it). I just want to remove the icon.

Answer 1

OK just tested this in SL and it worked, icon was removed but spotlight was still working in Finder:

$ cd /System/Library/CoreServices/
$ sudo mv Search.bundle/ Search2.bundle/

Now restart SystemUIServer, the icon is gone, Spotlight still works. To get Spotlight icon back:

$ sudo mv Search2.bundle/ Search.bundle/

And restart SystemUIServer again...

Answer 2

Snow Leopard and Leopard handle the Spotlight menu very differently. Under Leopard, the Spotlight menu is an application on its own rights. That application is launched by launchd. The menu may thus easily be disabled by modifying the appropriate launchd configuration file.

Snow Leopard seems to have revered to the Tiger way of running the Spotlight menu. The menu itself lives in /System/Library/CoreServices/Search.bundle . It is automatically loaded by SystemUIServer.app which is also host to menu extras.

While there are preference files allowing us to disable menu extras, I can't seem to find any way to disable Search.bundle

The previously suggested option of renaming Search.bundle does work, but comes at a high risk. A future system update may try to update Search.bundle and end up with a partial bundle file. Thus SystemUIServer will crash trying to load that bundle. To be safe, one would need to restore the bundle before each update. Hardly a desirable solution.

Moreover renaming Search.bundle or removing read rights affects all users on the machine. A per-user preferences as available under Leopard would be preferable.

Answer 3

How about doing a

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

?

In this way, the Search binary is still read/writable for root and can thus be updated by SoftwarUpdate. Making it non-readable for other users will prevent it from being launched!

Answer 4

This worked perfectly for me in SL. My menubar is back the way it belongs! Thanks!

Answer 5

Hello, After upgrading to SL the spotlight icon didn't show up in the right corner. I tried your suggestion as a solution but it didn't work. Also i know spotlight is working because i can perform searches from finder. Any idea? Thanks

Answer 6

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