How to disable Spotlight in High Sierra

[cman-uk]

Hi all,

Is there a way to disable Spotlight? Specifically these 2 aspects:

1. I'd prefer the indexing not to run on my Mac
2. I'd like to remove the Spotlight icon from the menu bar

I've managed to do the above steps for an old Mac running 10.9 (Mavericks) days, but any ideas for High Sierra appreciated (taking into account System Integrity Protection which I'm happy to disable and then enable)

Thank you!

 

[Fishrrman]

Have you tried these commands in terminal?

Turn off spotlight:
sudo mdutil -a -i off

Stop indexing of all volumes:
sudo defaults write /.Spotlight-V100/VolumeConfiguration Exclusions -array "/Volumes"

 

[cman-uk]

This seems to have worked in Terminal:

sudo launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist

Had to first turn off System Integrity Protection via the following:
Command-R to reboot into Recovery Mode --> Utilities --> Terminal then:

csrutil disable

Of course I re-enabled once the launchctl unload command was run.

I've not targeted disabling indexing as I believe Alfred relies on the same index.