Sunday, August 7, 2016

Disable Developer Search Results in Spotlight on OSX

We’ll just need to trick Spotlight into thinking you have Xcode installed. To do this, open a Terminal window. Press Command+Space, type Terminal, and press Enter to launch a terminal window from Spotlight. You can also open a Finder window, click “Applications” in the sidebar, double-click the “Utilities” folder, and then double-click the “Terminal” shortcut.
Type the following two commands into the terminal window, pressing Enter after each to run them:
cd /Applications
touch Xcode.app
This creates an empty file named Xcode.app in your Applications folder. It doesn’t take up any space, and it doesn’t do anything. You’ll see it in your Applications folder, although you won’t be able to launch or do anything with it.
You can now reopen the Spotlight pane in System Preferences. With a file named Xcode.app present, it will show you the “Developer” checkbox and you can uncheck it, removing the Developer search results from your Spotlight searches.
Don’t delete the empty Xcode.app file later — you’ll need to leave it there. If you reopen the Spotlight preferences panel after deleting the Xcode.app, it seems to re-enable Developer searches in Spotlight again.

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