i-Tweak: Remove Spotlight "developer" and "Web searches"

Saturday, January 7, 2012

Here is a fix for removing the developer category from Spotlight.

Go to ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.spotlight.plist
Open Terminal. You will need to convert the file to XML (from binary) so you can edit it in TextEdit. The command you need is plutil -convert xml1 ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.spotlight.plist

Open this file in TextEdit. Just before at the bottom, add the following:

Code:

      <dict>
      <key>enabled</key>
      <false/>
      <key>name</key>
      <string>SOURCE</string>
  </dict>

Convert the file back to binary using plutil -convert binary1 ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.spotlight.plist
Log out and back in again.

Anonymous said...: Thanks for the tip! There's a small error in the XML you need to add. The false element should be a self closing tag so it's missing a '/' character. It should read:

no the current code will produce a parse error when you attempt to convert back to binary.; July 22, 2012 at 7:58 PM
Anonymous said...: Thanks for the tip! There's a small error in the XML you need to add. The false element should be a self closing tag so it's missing a '/' character. It should read:

"" not "" the current code will produce a parse error when you attempt to convert back to binary.; July 22, 2012 at 8:00 PM