Spotlight 'developer' and 'Web searches' can't be disabled?

[hobspain]

gristel: thanks for posting the update. It seems that in El Capitan 10.11.3 it indeed works (10.11 didn't for me).

 

[gristel]

my pleasure

 

[RedTomato]

There is a solution to this on Yosemite. It is to create a dummy Xcode application in the applications folder, then Spotlight will think you are a dev and allow you to turn it developer search results off.

To create the dummy Xcode app you have to go in to terminal and paste these separately otherwise it'll not work...

cd /Applications
touch Xcode.app

Then go into system preferences and uncheck "Developer" form Spotlight searches. You may have to reopen system preferences to see the option appear...

Then open another terminal window and paste this to hide the dummy app, don't worry as spotlight will still think Xcode is installed

chflags hidden /Applications/Xcode.app

And there you are developer search results are hidden on Yosemite

Worked great for me in El Capitan. Many thanks for solving a long-standing irritation!

I tested deleting the Xcode file, which made the Developer item vanish from the Spotlight syspref menu. Straightaway the Dev items started showing again in Spotlight searches. So if you *don't* have xcode, it defaults to both activating *and* hiding the Dev spotlight preference option. Niiiiice.