Enable Transparent Effect for Hidden Apps in the Dock

I have a tendency to leave A LOT of Applications open at once, and I also leave a lot of windows open at the same time - so its really hard to tell which Apps I have hidden on my Dock.

There is a trick, however, to making this much easy to see. Plus, it looks really cool.

All you have to do to enable the Transparent Dock effect is open the Terminal and paste the following into the Terminal window:

defaults write com.apple.Dock showhidden -bool YES

The reload the Dock by typing in the following:

killall Dock

Note that if you have any applications hidden already you may have to show them, then re-hide them before the effect will display properly.

If you want to disable this effect at anytime you can do so by opening the Terminal again and typing in the following:

defaults write com.apple.Dock showhidden -bool NO

Then reloading the Dock again.

 
 

Submitted on August 27, 2008 at 6:38 am - Enable Transparent Effect for Hidden Apps in the Dock was written by Michael - There have been 5 comments - Categorized in Dock Tips, Terminal Tips

5 Responses to “Enable Transparent Effect for Hidden Apps in the Dock”

1. 
   James
   Would be awesome if there was a command to hide the Dock icon completely when an app was hidden :)
   
   Nice tip anyway, I have it active. August 27th, 2008 at 8:47 am
   
   
2. 
   Kevin Gorzny
   I always wondered if this was possible - always made sense to me.
   
   Thanks. August 27th, 2008 at 5:31 pm
   
   
3. 
   JaY
   Was wondering if where can I find the terminal place to paste te command??? thanx September 1st, 2008 at 9:06 pm
   
   
4. 
   bigkat
   Was wondering if where can I find the terminal place to paste te command??? thanx
   Jay: Terminal is an application. By default it's supposed to be in your Utilities folder. As far as I understand you should launch app. named Terminal and do the tip. That's it.
   _________________________
   Thanks for this tip. I am wondering if it works with Tiger? September 4th, 2008 at 8:11 pm
   
   
5. 
   Michael
   @bigkat
   
   Yes, this does work in Tiger. September 4th, 2008 at 11:36 pm
   
   

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