Lincoln Stoll

Getting rid of the Spotlight Menu Icon in 10.6

It seems that Snow Leopard has gone back to the 10.4 way of displaying the spotlight menu item, which fortunately makes it easy to disable. This saves precious real estate, and gets rid of something that is pointless - I use launchbar for this. To disable run:

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

This makes the item only readable by root, ensuring that it will get updated by software update and the link, but won’t be runnable by you. To rever this, change the permissions back to 644.