Topher, an avid Mac user for the past 15 years, has been a contributing author to MacFixIt since the spring of 2008. One of his passions is troubleshooting Mac problems and making the best use of Macs ...

There's a very detailed, Terminal-intensive and (imho) somewhat just plain crazy and risky hack over at Mac OS X Hints that shows you how to eradicate Spotlight from Tiger. However, MacFixIt offers a ...

No, not this kind of spotlight. Photo: Charlie Sorrel/Cult of Mac If you use Spotlight to find stuff on your iPhone or iPad, you’ll be familiar with the mess of results you get when you search. Maybe ...

Spotlight was touted as one of the most generally useful new features in Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger). Using a home-brewed metadata indexing system, Apple delivered a search mechanism that claims superior ...

Reader Curt Douglass would rather do without Spotlight. He writes: How can I remove Spotlight from my machine? I use Xcode for application development and on a 17” screen, I need the space. I have ...

While you are still in the Terminal, type "killall Spotlight" to turn off the spotlight service right then. Spotlight will suddenly dissappear from your menu bar.

I've noticed a bit of a delay in my Spotlight searches. I had a very large disk attached to my MBP and it was full of PDFs, DOCs etc. Spotlight definitely indexed it. Just recently I also removed a ...