How To Turn OFF And ON Spotlight In Mac OS Sierra

The best way to disable or enable Spotlight search in Mac OS Sierra is by using Terminal. If you want to disable the Spotlight search on OS X 10.4 and 10.5, read this guide. One main reason why Apple users want to disable Spotlight search is because of mdworker, the software that runs Spotlight. The following will allow you to enable or disable Spotlight on your Mac computer.

Open the terminal (found in / Applications / Utilities /) and enter the following commands based on the need to disable or re-enable Spotlight indexing. This will affect indexing on all drives connected to the Mac.

Disable Spotlight

The main method uses launchctl, this will require the administrative password:

sudo launchctl deload 

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

Another approach is to use the older indexing method of "sudo mdutil -a-i off" which disables indexing only, but more in one minute.

Repeatable Spotlight

The guaranteed way to restore Spotlight is to reload it in launchd using launchctl:

sudo launchctlload 

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

Again, the alternative approach is the "sudo mdutil -a -i on" command associated with indexing, but this method can start the "Spotlight server is disabled" error and do not allow you to reactivate it. If you encounter this problem, use the sudo launchctl load command instead to enable indexing and Spotlight.

After Spotlight has completely redefined launchd, the mds agent will begin to reindex on the file system. The time will be different for each usage depending on the number of changes made and new files since the last time MDS worked. You can verify that MDS is running through Activity Monitor or by removing the Spotlight menu to see an "Indexing Drive Name" progress bar.

Another option is to selectively disable the Spotlight indexing of specific drives or folders by excluding them from the index, which is much easier to do and does not involve the command line, to move and drop items in the Spotlight control panel.

It is important to know that some other features and programs of Mac OS Sierra are supported. Searching for Spotlight and other applications may not work differently if you turn off the Spotlight search. But there are specific cases where Spotlight focusing is a logical decision, and the ability to reestablish Spotlight using the above commands makes the process easy to reverse if the need to reverse the change.