7th
My Dock
The following is a free presentation made possible by viewers like you me. It is also a Mac hint, so continue on at your own risk/leisure.
Last night I was vexed with my Dock. I had it hidden on the bottom center of my screen like usual, trying to maximize screen space, but it kept on popping up and down, so I might as well have had it always up. Nothing was broken, but I just didn’t like how it worked, at this particular time it was most particularly annoying.
I never use my dock. I type. Cmd-Tab for all your application switching needs. Expose for window navigation, and Spotlight for launching, finding, and everything else. So I did a search to find if you could make the Dock go away. While that was not possible, I did find a Terminal script that hid the Dock in the upper center, underneath the menu bar. So, on the off chance I need to find something that is in my Dock, like a minimized window, (which there isn’t a hotkey to get back), I can go to it. It avoids the accidental Dock “summons” because it is harder to invoke the Dock, you have to hold your mouse in just the right spot.
Ok, enough of the typing, here is a short screen cast I took of how it works. Too bad for some reason I have to link to it. Apparently Tumblr won’t let you embed a video within a text post. Something to look into. A look at how it works
To make the Dock (almost) disappear, I use this sequence of command line incantations (write these in a Terminal or iTerm window):
defaults write com.apple.dock launchanim -bool no
defaults write com.apple.dock magnification -bool no
defaults write com.apple.dock autohide -bool yes
defaults write com.apple.dock orientation -string top
defaults write com.apple.dock pinning -string end
defaults write com.apple.dock tilesize -int 16
killall Dock
(note: most of these commands can be changed in the dock system preferences, like autohide and tilesize, etc, but others are helpful)
