Adding Flexible Recent Items Stack to Mac Dock
Here’s a useful little trick, you can add a special Recent Items stack to your dock which behaves differently to normal stacks. It allows you to choose between Recent Applications, Recent Documents, Recent Servers, Favourite Volumes and Favourite Items … as shown in this screen shot:
To enable this you need to open a terminal window and copy the commands below into it:
-
-
#this command adds the special recent items stack to your dock
-
defaults write com.apple.dock persistent-others -array-add ‘{ "tile-data" = { "list-type" = 1; }; "tile-type" = "recents-tile"; }’
-
-
#this is optional, adds highlight to item you hover over in stack
-
defaults write com.apple.dock mouse-over-hilte-stack -boolean YES
-
-
#restart the dock (capitalisation is important here!)
-
killall Dock
-
Once done you’ll have a nifty little Recent Item’s stack, and I must confess I really like the highlight feature.
I got this error:
-bash: syntax error near unexpected token `}’
Comment by John Clark — March 30, 2008 @ 4:10 pm
LiveWriter has helpfully turned your single quotes into smart 6 and 9 quotes in command 3. This stops it working if you just copy and paste into terminal.
Other than that – Thanks
Comment by Rob Styles — March 30, 2008 @ 6:31 pm
Thanks for the help…It now works great.
Comment by John Clark — March 31, 2008 @ 5:29 pm
That is utterly awesome! I love it, and like you, I especially like the highlighting. Oh, and thanks to Rob for explaining the quotes thing.
Comment by Rhys — April 2, 2008 @ 7:56 pm
After my last Restart all of my Favorite Items are duplicated!! What would cause this to happen?
I deleted the duplicates in the Finder Places pane, however there are still 2 desktop icons in the Recent Items folder…???
Comment by John Clark — April 4, 2008 @ 10:47 pm
hi. i’m not a computer whiz so i don’t really know how to do this, but do you just copy the whole thing into the terminal?
Comment by Esther — September 19, 2008 @ 9:34 pm
Esther,
just copy each of the three commands in your terminal, dont copy the three lines that begin with # these are just comments.
So if you want the recent items tile paste the following line into your terminal and press enter:
defaults write com.apple.dock persistent-others -array-add ‘{ “tile-data” = { “list-type” = 1; }; “tile-type” = “recents-tile”; }’
If you want the highlight when you hover over an item paste the following line into the terminal and press enter:
defaults write com.apple.dock mouse-over-hilte-stack -boolean YES
finally you have to paste this line into the terminal and press enter in order for the changes to take effect:
killall Dock
… I hope that clarifies things.
Comment by nadeem.shabir — September 20, 2008 @ 6:32 am
I did this and it woks, but the Dock shows only recent application. I want only recent Documents/files.. how do we do that ?
Comment by Aman — December 10, 2008 @ 3:32 pm
[...] Virtual Chaos – Nadeem’s blog Tags: Dock, Hack, Stack, Terminal ← 4-finger Multi touch breaks Macbook [...]
Pingback by fifty eight | 58 | Recent and Favorite Items Stack — February 21, 2009 @ 4:40 am