Force the Dock to only show running applications

Jan 08, '09 07:30:03AM

Contributed by: robg

Here's an interesting Dock modification, though to be honest, I'm not sure exactly when it might prove useful. In Terminal, enter these two commands:

$ defaults write com.apple.dock static-only -bool TRUE
$ killall Dock
As soon as you kill the Dock, when it respawns you'll notice that only your running applications are listed -- in other words, any program you've added to the Dock won't be shown unless it's running. You can obviously accomplish the same end result by simply dragging all your static applications out of the Dock while nothing other than the Finder is running; so that's why I'm not sure how useful this command really is.

The only potential use I can see for it is if you've got a really crowded Dock, and you wanted to temporarily simplify it, you can use this command -- because when you reverse the preferences setting by repeating the above command with FALSE at the end, all your static icons will come back, so you don't have to manually re-add them. I should add that's how it worked for me, but proceed at your own risk -- if you try it, there's a chance you may end up adding back your static items by hand.

So are there other uses for this Dock alteration that I'm just not seeing?

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