Disabling Spotlight

[Shintsu]

I've seen posts about what you type and how to edit the Hostconfig file but good god, I DO NOT KNOW ANYTHING about the terminal. I used to use DOS a little and I grasp that but I do NOT have a clue how to use terminal and every link I find on the web assumes I'm an uber geek who understands.

Please, will someone just tell me how to SAVE the Hostconfig file? For complete idiots? What does the ^X and stuff mean, how do I do that? I mean a step by step of precisely the keys and combinations I need to type to save the file so it's disabled. I'd really appreciate it, I think it's bogging my iBook down.

 

[Hal Itosis]

Since i don't want to encourage anyone to disable Spotlight (much better is to troubleshoot what it's getting hung up on), i won't take time to do a Unix editor tutorial.

But if a GUI tool would help: you should check out TextWrangler. It handles opening files buried inside invisible directories, and it manages all the privilege escalation business, and it can even be configured to make date-stamped backup files for us automatically.

PS: idunno which OS version you have, but i think that Spotlight trick was broken by Leopard...

$ [COLOR="Blue"]cat /etc/hostconfig[/COLOR]
# This file is going away

AFPSERVER=-NO-
AUTHSERVER=-NO-
TIMESYNC=-NO-
QTSSERVER=-NO-

See? No more "SPOTLIGHT=-YES-" line anymore. If you have Tiger, then maybe.

EDIT: ah okay... now i can see your sig. Yes, for Tiger the trick should work. Try TextWrangler then.

EDIT 2: Just to repeat my other warning... OSX without Spotlight is kinda lame.

 

[mysterytramp]

Not quite as geeky, but couldn't you click the Privacy tab of the Spotlight system preference and turn off Spotlight on all your hard disks?

But Hal_Itosis is right. Rather than disabling Spotlight altogether, you should try to troubleshoot your Spotlight issues. I'm folks on this board would help.

mt