How to work in OS X without using the Dock
Mar 19, '04 10:42:00AM
Contributed by: twalkabout
I used to love the dock. The Microsoft task bar was the one cool thing about Windows that I missed in Mac OS 9 and below. When OS X came out, the most noticeable difference for me was the dock. However, I have found myself over the past couple of years using the dock less and less and instead using a variety of shareware programs, browswer tabs, keyboard shortcuts, etc -- and now with Panther and Exposé, I have finally hidden the dock for good. If you have a 23" monitor, it doesn't really matter -- but for all of you out there with small screens -- read on to gain back some precious screen real estate...
[robg adds: I know opinions on the dock vary greatly, and we've run previous hints about working around it and/or disabling it, but the following is a nice summary of other ways of doing Dock-like things.]
I will break it down into functions of the dock and how I have replaced them (borrowing heavily from other hints from this site):
- Application/Document Launching — you just can't beat LaunchBar -- a couple keystrokes and you can open any application, document, or website. Or open up an email to someone in your Address Book. Once you get used to this program, you won't be able to live without it. If you are really afraid of keyboard shortcuts, DragThing has been around before the dock and is also an excellent program, but I personally don't use it with LaunchBar.
- Application Switching — There are three easy ways to do this now — using LaunchBar (which I talked about above), Exposé, or Panther's built-in Application Switcher (aka hitting Apple-tab). Exposé (for which there are already a million hints about, but two remapping hints that I personally have found particularly helpful was to remap the Enter key on my powerbook and also to my mouse keys. The built-in app switcher, which has no real name (unless you want to call it Apple's version of LiteSwitchX) is explained in these hints: 1, 2
The one thing that I'm not sure if there is a hint for (but there should be) -- is simply hitting Apple-tilde to switch between windows in an application (aka the non-graphical version of Exposé' F10). I actually learned that from the keyboard shortcuts list in the keyboard preference pane [robg adds: No hint about it because it's a built-in, documented system feature.].
- Notification (new mail, new iChat messages, etc). - I like having the little mail star showing when and how many new messages you have. That was the last thing I was missing from the dock. Although it does show when you activate the app switcher (Apple-tab), I like using Konfabulator, which is just a cool program and impossible to understand until you try it. It's reviewed here on Hints. There are a lot of mail checking 'widgets' that you can get at the Widget Gallery, but I like the mail check star. There are over 500 widgets now, most of them to be honest are useless (there are at least five dancing japanimation characters). However, after some trial and error, you will find some really good ones (right now in addition to the mail check I use: iTunes Bezel, iChat Bezel, iTunes History, TuneRater, miniCalendar, miniWeather, CNN Splash, NGDesktop Pic, and Quotes). For iChat, I just have it set to keep bouncing when I get a message for the first time (granted I don't use iChat a lot, so this might be a pain for somebody that uses it a lot -- there might be a widget that tells you when you get a new message or something).
- Minimized windows —Tthe cool thing about the Windows taskbar was that you could minimize windows, especially different web pages -- and quickly switch between them. Now, with the combination of Exposé, the app swicher, and tabbed browsing in basically every browser (I'm now almost exclusively using the OmniWeb beta because I love the graphical tabs feature) - I don't really feel the need to minimize windows anymore.
- Trash — I delete stuff by hitting apple-delete, so I don't use the drag and drop function. However, I still used the dock to see if the trash was full or to open it up until yesterday. Then I read the hint about Path Finder, which I hadn't ever tried before, although I had heard of it when it was called SNAX (reviewed here on Hints).
- Bookmarking documents/webpages — I was never a big user of using the second half of the dock (to the right/bottom of the line). Every now and then there was a webpage that I really didn't want to forget to go back to, so I'd throw it on the dock. Now, with Exposé, where I actually see my desktop again during a good part of the day, I'll just put a bookmark on the desktop. I also used to have the application menu on the dock so I could right click it for a contextual menu. Now I just use LaunchBar. For those of you that miss the contextual menu, PathFinder has an app menu in the program and on the menubar. For documents that I want to access frequently (e.g. a todo list), I'll put it on the titlebar of Finder or Path Finder (Path Finder continues to have a favorites folder as well that you could use).
- Dragging documents to Mail or an app to send/start up - I would often drag a document or a picture to the Mail app to send it. Honestly, I still do that with the dock hidden, but recently, I've found myself starting up my message using LaunchBar, then using Exposé to grab a file and drop it into the message.
- Quitting Applications - Instead of right clicking on programs in the dock, now I'll use the application switcher (Apple-tab then hit Q when the program you want to quit is highlighted). Also, Path Finder has a Processes drawer where you can easily quit apps by hitting the 'x' key.
I'm sure there are more features to the dock that I'm missing that there may or may not be easy replacements for. I hope this was helpful to somebody. Let me know what ideas you guys have for permanently hiding the dock.
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Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20040315043002807