If you’re like me — that is, for the purpose of this post, you use a Mac and either Gmail or Google Apps for email — you’ll be happy to learn (or are already happy to know) about today’s launch of Google Desktop for OS X. One search box to rule them all: applications, files, emails, browsing history, internet search, etc.
If you’re even more like me and find Spotlight to be slow (and you aren’t a diehard Quicksilver user), you’ll probably dig this. So why not just do away with Spotlight altogether? OK:
- go to /System/Library/CoreServices
- copy Search.bundle to some place like your Documents folder for backup, then delete the original
- open Activity Montor and force quit SystemUIServer
When SystemUIServer relaunches you’ll be free at last. Spotlight will still index your files for use with the Finder et al, but the menu bar item will be gone. Now you can use trusty old Cmd + Space for Google Desktop instead of the default Cmd + Cmd. Stop reading my email and enjoy.
LINK/DOWNLOAD [Google Desktop for Mac]
User
4 comments
Recommending people delete Spotlight is kinda ridiculous since you can change the Spotlight hotkey in the Spotlight prefs pane. I personally
True but why even keep it in the menu bar if you’re never going to use it?
Who knows how OSX will use it in the future? It seems like a smarter hack to look for ways to get rid of the icon rather than deleting the app outright. But to each their own.
Quicksilver fo eva. Don’t know why my last post got cropped… hmm…
You’re not deleting Spotlight as a process, you’re just deleting the icon. The OS still has full use of Spotlight and its indexing, the only thing that changes is whether or not you can access it via the menu bar.
In the end the solution took me about a minute to research and implement — about as much time as I’m willing to invest in something like this. If anyone has better ideas I’m always game.
Leave your own
You can follow any responses to this entry via its RSS comments feed. You can also leave a trackback if you like.