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TUAW Tip: Highlight items in gridded stacks

Highlight gridded stacks
The Dock's Stacks feature lets Leopard users view a folder's worth of stuff with one click. You'll either love it or hate it, use it or not. If you do use it, here's a little tip that improves it slightly (in my opinion).

When you've got a bunch of files from a Stack displayed in Grid View, it can be hard to spot the particular one you're looking for, especially if many of them look identical (such a collection of text files or word processor documents).

Luckily, there's a highlight you can switch on, that puts a whiter background around the file you're mousing over. It makes it slightly easier to ensure you click on the correct file.

The highlight appears normally if you use the arrow keys to move around a Grid, or if you type Command and the first letter of one of the files displayed. But this trick switches it on permanently, so that it is always in action whether or not you use these keyboard shortcuts.

Read on for all the commands.
Switching the highlight on and off is easy. You can either type a short pair of commands command into Terminal:

defaults write com.apple.dock mouse-over-hilte-stack -boolean yes
killall Dock

(Repeat that with "no" instead of "yes" to put things back the way they were.)

Or, if you'd rather stay away from Terminal, use Alcor's Secrets prefpane to switch it on and off (go to Dock, and check "Hightlight stack items on hover"). Secrets does come with some warnings that you could break things terribly if you're not careful, which is true. But you'll be careful, won't you?

The Dock's Stacks feature lets Leopard users view a folder's worth of stuff with one click. You'll either love it or hate it, use it or...
 

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Lachlan Hunt

There is a terrible delay with the highlight following the mouse that makes this unusable. I don't recommend turning it on.

August 22 2008 at 4:49 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
fini

Awesome tip, I couldn't get the terminal command to work, but Secrets did it perfectly. I'm actually kind of mad now, I bought that last Mac Heist Bundle and it gave me Mac Pilot, which pretty much is exactly the same as Secrets, o well I guess the other two apps in the bundle made up for it, even though I will probably never use Lineform.

July 19 2008 at 2:58 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Eric

I have two Stacks I use regularly, and they contain mostly text files... I have never had trouble clicking on the correct one.

July 17 2008 at 5:43 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
1 reply to Eric's comment
M E

Amen Eric

July 18 2008 at 4:35 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
freeskihp

hey, what is the app that you use to get the dock off center

July 17 2008 at 1:51 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
1 reply to freeskihp's comment
gilest

There are several ways of doing it. The aforementioned Secrets prefpane is one of them. Also apps like Tweak Freak and the like.

July 17 2008 at 3:39 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Big John

You don't have to press Command to use the type-to-highlight. Just open the Stack and start typing straight away.

July 17 2008 at 12:07 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
David

Now THAT'S a great tip! I was just thinking last week how frustrating it is when I have tons of stuff in my Downloads folder. Now I can find stuff!

July 17 2008 at 11:21 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
djfred

Great tip. Thanks.

July 17 2008 at 11:03 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Chris

Also, if you click on your stack and then hit the Spacebar it will highlight the first item in the stack with this highlight. You can then arrow through the stack.

July 17 2008 at 11:02 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
SinnMan

This is an awesome tip. I love it. My applications folder is huge and this makes it much easier.

July 17 2008 at 10:57 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Rafe H.

I really want to be able to quickview items in a stack. Any ideas how I can do this?

July 17 2008 at 10:55 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
1 reply to Rafe H.'s comment
Zoli

Count me in for this request too!

July 17 2008 at 11:04 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
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