Anatomy of the Dock

The dock is one of the central features of Mac OS X, and is very useful right out of the box, but there are several tweaks (hacks) that you can use to increase your productivity on OS X. This post will cover the ones I find the most useful.

Dock Spacers

These help you organize your dock into easily identifiable segments. For example, on my dock, I have Finder, spacer, Web and Communication Apps, spacer, Web Development apps, spacer, Running apps. This makes it easy to identify which section each app would be in.

To accomplish this, you simply need to type (or copy) this line into your Terminal:

defaults write com.apple.dock persistent-apps -array-add '{ "tile-type" = "spacer-tile"; }' && killall Dock

You can create multiple spacers at the same times, (by omitting the second line) but they won't show up on your dock until you execute killall Dock (which restarts your dock).

Transparent Icons

I've written about this before, it causes a hidden application icon to be semi-transparent, showing you that you have that application hidden.

Again, a simple trip to the Terminal will give you this effect.

defaults write com.apple.dock showhidden -bool true && killall Dock

Use 2D Dock in (Snow) Leopard

If you don't like the look of the 3D dock introduced in Leopard, but would like to keep it on the bottom (the left and right docks are automatically 2D), this line in the Terminal makes the switch:

defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES && killall Dock

Use the New List Style in Snow Leopard

In Snow Leopard, Apple added a secret, "experimental" list view for Stacks. To enable it, type (or copy) this line into the Terminal. Thanks to Abraham Vegh for reminding me of this great tip!

defaults write com.apple.dock use-new-list-stack -bool YES && killall Dock

If you have any tips on using the Dock in Mac OS X, feel free to contact me and I'll happily add it with a link to your site.

#osx#dock#tweaks#howto (∞)