How To: Turn Off Spotlight In Mac OS X 10.6

Some people don’t like automagical stuff, which is always nefarious, and others are after maximum clock cycles. Me, I like Spotlight, but I like enabling folks even more. Here are two ways to turn off Spotlight in Snow Leopard.

If you fear the command line, then this is the Spotlight (mostly) be gone kludge for you. Fire up System Preferences and…

• System Preferences > Spotlight

• Click the Privacy tab

• Click the “+” (plus) sign and then add your Macintosh HD

This particular method doesn’t turn Spotlight off per se, but effectively shuts it down because it doesn’t have anything to do.

Terminal Power

The command line has powerful voodoo and some fear it like a zombie apocalypse. That level of trepidation is unwarranted and you don’t know Mac until you get at least a little Zen with the blinking cursor.

• Fire up the Terminal (Utilities > Terminal)

• Type or paste “sudo mdutil -a -i off” and then hit Return

• Contrariwise to re-enable Spotlight, type or paste “sudo mdutil -a -i on”

and hit Return

And, if you like these Spotlight killers, then our How to disable Dashboard in OS X Snow Leopard is probably right up your alley, too.

Gotta great Mac OS X tip or trick? Share it and a link in the comments below…