Remove Spotlight icon from the menu bar

Question

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

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:

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 SoftwareUpdate. Making it non-readable for other users will prevent it from being launched!

Answer 4

To hide the Spotlight menu bar item without renaming the responsible bundle and affecting only one user, an ACL entry can be set to deny execution:

$ cd /System/Library/CoreServices/Search.bundle/Contents/MacOS
$ sudo chmod +a "USER_SHORT_NAME deny read,execute" Search
$ killall -HUP SystemUIServer

Replace USER_SHORT_NAME with the actual short name for the user, who wants the menu hidden. Notice that there is no space in between read and execute, just a comma.

To revert the changes replace +a with -a in the chmod command:

$ cd /System/Library/CoreServices/Search.bundle/Contents/MacOS
$ sudo chmod -a "USER_SHORT_NAME deny read,execute" Search
$ killall -HUP SystemUIServer

Answer 5

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

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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

Answer 6

Quick and easy is to use the free utility OnyX.

Also, I'm using LaunchBar set to use a keyboard shortcut for Spotlight search in LaunchBar (set in LB prefs).

This also stops keyboard shortcuts for Spotlight, but not in Finder searching.