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We know that Dock is one of the most essential features on your Mac, without your Dock, I can say that you will lose roughly half of your productivity. Even folks at Windows are imitating the Dock, as can be seen here, here and here also.

As a big fan of tweaking, I love to play around with the system files of the Dock. And more importantly, I've found out several tweaks that I believe will give you an extra boost in productivity and self proud.

But before we started…

Disclaimer

We won't take any responsibilities for damages or data loss due to practicing the content of this article. Please kindly backup your files involved in the tweaking before you proceed.

Now, I've shouted it out, let's begin our tweaking!

Tweaking Dock Menu

Sometimes, I just want to have fun and change the menu name for my Dock, like changing "Empty Trash" into "Remove Junk". But we can use this creativity to tweak around whole contextual menu of your Mac, to increase your convenience while navigating around with Dock.

It's really simple. Just follow the steps and do the backup beforehand than you will do no harm to your Mac.

1. Go to Your Hard Drive, e.g. Macintosh HD and then open folder System → Library → CoreServices
2. Look for Dock, Control-Click on it and choose Show Package Contents
3. Move inside Contents → Resources → English.lproj
4. Copy DockMenus.strings to your Desktop followed by deleting the original DockMenus.strings inside English.lproj
5. Open copied DockMenus.strings, search for EMPTY_TRASH = "Empty Trash"; and replace the whole line with EMPTY_TRASH = "Remove Junk";
   You can also search for QUIT = "Quit"; and change it to QUIT = "Quit %@";
6. Save the file as DockMenus.strings and move it back to English.lproj folder
7. Restart your Dock with command line killall Dock

Now your menu will change from simply stating "Quit" (don't know what to quit) to "Quit" followed by the Application name.

Changing Trash Name

If you feel bored with your old Trash Name, i.e. Trash, you can change it anytime you want. But bear in mind that, I never force you to do the tweak.

1. Go to Your Hard Drive, e.g. Macintosh HD and open System → Library → CoreServices
2. Look for Dock, Control-Click on it and choose Show Package Contents
3. Move inside Contents → Resources → English.lproj
4. Copy InfoPlist.strings to your Desktop and delete original InfoPlist.strings inside English.lproj
5. Open copied InfoPlist.strings
6. Search for the line of text: TrashName = "Trash"; and change it to TrashName = "Recycle Bin";. Save it
7. Throw it back to folder English.lproj
8. Restart your Dock with killall Dock

Anyway, if you don't like the name "Recycle Bin", you can change to other name.

Fixing Grid View

Default view:

After the tweak:

The Leopard behavior to hide the text in the middle is quite unconvenient for me. Since I can't change this behavior, I will just cut down the length of the text, so it can be displayed as whole.

Here are the steps to do the tweak.

1. Go to Your Hard Drive, e.g. Macintosh HD. Open System → Library → CoreServices
2. Look for Dock, Control-Click on it and choose Show Package Contents
3. Move inside Contents → Resources → English.lproj
4. Copy Localizable.strings to your Desktop. Delete the original Localizable.strings inside English.lproj
5. Open copied Localizable.strings
6. Search for "MORE_IN_FINDER" = "%d More in Finder";. Replace the whole line with "MORE_IN_FINDER" = "More...";
7. Save the file as Localizable.strings and move it back to English.lproj folder
8. Restart your Dock with command line killall Dock

And you will get the same result as mine (hopefully).

Metallic Gradient Effect on Mouse Over

Handling bunch of Applications at once, it will be really nice if we have a sort of indicator other than our tiny mouse pointer…

1. Open your Finder
2. Go inside Applications → Utilities
3. Open Terminal
4. Execute command line: defaults write com.apple.dock mouse-over-hilte-stack -boolean YES
5. Restart your Dock by executing command line: killall Dock
6. Change your Dock folder to Grid View, sit back and enjoy the gradient effect
7. If you want to disable it (but I don't think you want to), repeat from step 4, but change the value of -boolean YES to -boolean NO

Reveal Stack of Recent Items

1. Open your Terminal
2. Execute command line: defaults write com.apple.dock persistent-others -array-add '{ "tile-data" = { "list-type" = 1; }; "tile-type" = "recents-tile"; }'
3. Restart your Dock by using commnad line: killall Dock
4. You can select to view several kind of hidden features here, such as showing Recent Servers
5. You can add many more stacks of recent items by executing step 2 many times
6. Simply drag the stack out of your Dock to remove the folder

Make Hidden Applications Less Opaque

By default, you won't be able to distinguish between hidden applications and shown applications, after running this tweak, you will.

1. Open your Terminal (Now you should know how to find your Terminal)
2. Execute this command line: defaults write com.apple.Dock showhidden -bool YES
3. Restart Dock with killall Dock
4. Try to hide one of your applications and see the effect
5. If you want to revert back, execute the command line from step 2 again, but now by changing -bool YES to -bool NO

Split your Dock with Spacer

When sometimes you want to categorize your Dock into several parts, you will want to put a blank space between Applications. Lucky for you, today you will now how to do the tweak.

1. Open your Terminal
2. Execute command line: defaults write com.apple.dock persistent-apps -array-add '{"tile-type"="spacer-tile";}'
3. Repeat as many times as you want for creating several spacers
4. Restart your Dock with killall Dock
5. You can drag around the spacers. And you can also drag it out of your Dock to remove it