Filed under: Hacks, How-tos, Tips and tricks
Hide an Icon in the Dock
The über-Mac geeks over at mac geekery answer a reader question I have often wondered about myself: is it possible to hide an application's icon so it does not appear in your Dock, even though the application is running? And the answer is yes, if you're up for a little bit of relatively easy hacking. Apparently all you have to do is drill down into the Application package (right-click on the application icon and choose "show package contents") and add one key to its Info.plist file. JC warns that this may have some unintended consequences, as the "Dock controls almost all aspects of application switching," so if you do this you may "lose" the application and have no way to interact with it. In addition some applications "interact with their Dock icon programmatically" (e.g. the way Mail.app shows the number of unread messages in its Dock icon), so this is not a good idea for those programs. However, if you have something that must run all the time, but with which you don't interact much, and whose Dock icon you want out of there (e.g. the DynDNS Updater client), this is a handy tip. One word of warning, be sure to duplicate any application you decide to try this on first, so that you can go back if necessary. A second word of warning, this affects the menubar as well as the Dock.[Update: several commenters have mentioned Dockless, as a more user-friendly way of doing this. I originally misunderstood what Dockless did, but after a little more research it turns out that Dockless basically just automates the very same process this tip describes (i.e. changing the value of the LSUIElement key in the info.plist file).]
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
okto said 1:29PM on 2-18-2007
Or use Dockless.
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okto said 1:30PM on 2-18-2007
Sorry, there was supposed to be a link there, didn't realize HTML wasn't supported:
http://homepage.mac.com/fahrenba/programs/dockless/dockless.html
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Feaverish said 1:59PM on 2-18-2007
Another way of doing this is detailed here: http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20050819232526710
You basically freeze the running application (with kill -STOP), drag it's icon out of the Dock, quit and restart the Dock, and then unfreeze the app. It remains out of the Dock and app switcher until you restart the Dock or the app again, but it's still accessible with Quicksilver.
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Darkshadow said 2:16PM on 2-18-2007
Just to note, though, that doing this will also keep that app's menus in the menu bar from being shown.
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Dachaz said 3:17PM on 2-18-2007
Great tip!
I always hated having the HardwareGrowler icon in the dock as I never actually had to click it (since the program itself has nothing to be configured nor does it require any user interaction).
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stefan said 6:17PM on 2-18-2007
or use dockless, as the very first poster said.
seriously. With dockless, theres no opportunity to lose the app, because you can always find it again with dockless, and theres no need for mucking about with activity monitor or the terminal or whatever, cos its just in the dockless application.
simple.
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sterling said 3:43PM on 2-18-2007
That's funny, I never realized it was a universal thing. Users of iPulse might be familiar with the key in question. The iPulse readme document has explained how to do this for years.
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okto said 6:47PM on 2-23-2007
Also, Dockless doesn't lose the menus if you have a non-Dock way of switching to the app; I use it mostly on things that have menulets that I don't want taking up space both places (Aurora, last.fm), so I can still get to the menu items thru the menulet icon.
It's really a much better way of doing this and has been around for a while, I'm kinda disappointed TUAW didn't know about it or report it.
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Phillip Howell said 9:32PM on 2-19-2007
The update makes no sense. Who cares if Dockless is Universal or not? It's not like you have to run it all the time: you launch it, configure it, relaunch the applications you've fiddled with, and close it.
Dockless is *the way* to do this.
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