I’ve been on a customization kick lately and today was no different. I was looking at my dock this afternoon and realized that there are visual queues that notify the user when an application is open and when it is minimized. The former is shown through the little triangle under the applications icon, and the later by placing a thumbnail of the window in the dock. There wasn’t anything to tell the user that an application is ‘hidden’. This seemed odd since as we all know Apple is the king of usability and creature comforts. One would think that Apple would have given us a way to know what applications are running, but hidden.
And guess what? They did! The setting obviously isn’t on by default and isn’t easily found. But thats why I’m here, to learn and pass my knowledge on to others. Using the following tweak will make the icon of any ‘hidden’ application semi-transparent.
To accomplish this you will need 2 tools, Terminal.app and Activity Monitor.app. Both are located in the /Applications/Utilities/ directory. So fire them up and lets get started.
In Terminal.app type the following at the prompt…
defaults write com.apple.Dock showhidden -bool yesIf you decided that you don’t like the effect later simply repeat this process, but change ‘yes’ to ‘no’. This command enables the dock effect that we are trying to achieve. But to get the changes to take effect we need to restart the Dock.
To do so we’ll use Activity Monitor.app. At the top of the Activity Monitor.app where is says filter, you need to type…
DockNow select the Dock process and click the ‘Quit Process’ button in the top left. This will cause the dock to restart and reveal our customization!
Hidden applications are grayed out!
EDIT: Randy commented below with a quick alternative to restarting the dock. Simply type the following command in the terminal…
killall Dock
While this isn’t an essential tweak it provides you with useful information and a unique effect. I imagine that Apple didn’t enable this by default because they wanted to keep things simple, but I’m glad that they included a command to reveal the effect. I’ve been using this customization for a few days now without and problems and it’s worth the 30 seconds it takes enable it.
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Nice find. On the 2nd step, you can type ‘killall Dock’ in terminal to restart Dock and take effect.
There’s actually an easier way to do this. Just get OnyX (http://macupdate.com/info.php/id/11582). It allows tweaking some Mac OS X hidden features (including transparency of hidden applications’ icons), cleaning your system and running maintenance scripts (manually or on the scheduled basis). And it’s free.
Nice tip Randy. I’ll add it to the instructions.
I also found out that TinkerTool will do this as well. Onyx looks like it’s better though.
A question.
Wouldn’t a running application that has an invisible
or hidden icon in the dock show up in the Activity Monitor?
Thanx.
The icons aren’t invisible in the dock. They are just slightly grayed out a bit. If you look at the screenshot above the 3rd, 6th, 8th and last icons are grayed out because that application is hidden (ie hitting the Apple H key combination). The purpose of this trick is to allow the user to be able to see what applications are ‘hidden’ by looking at the dock. I hope that makes sense. :)