Table of Contents
One of the more interesting but less well-known ways to change the Dock on a Mac is to make the icons of Make Hidden Dock Icons Transparent and quiet in the Dock to show that they are hidden. If you look closely at the screenshots of the Mac Dock in this article, you’ll see that some of the icons are translucent, which is because they belong to apps that are not visible. It’s a small change, and you can use the command line in Mac OS X to turn on this hidden, optional setting.
Enabling translucent icons of hidden apps is a great feature for Mac users who hide apps to clear space on their desktop. It makes it easy to tell which apps are hidden and which ones aren’t by looking at the icons and seeing if they are transparent or not. If you hide apps often, you might want to turn this on yourself; it only takes a second. you can visit on Apple support center for further help.
Making the Mac Dock Icons Transparent
Hiding an application in Mac helps keep your desktop organized. A hidden application is open in the background but not visible on the desktop. A hidden app has an icon on the Dock. Clicking the Dock icon brings the app back onto the desktop.When you are inside an app, you can hide it by pressing Command+H. You can also click on the application’s name in the menu bar at the top left of the desktop and choose “Hide” from the dropdown menu.
By default, OS X doesn’t make it possible to tell the difference between a Dock icon and an icon for a hidden app. But if you turn on a switch in the operating system that makes hidden Dock icons transparent, you can see which Dock apps are open but hidden.
- Open Finder and browse to the Applications folder. Open the Utilities folder under that. Find and double-click the Terminal app to open it.
- Enter the following line in the Terminal
- Refresh the Dock by entering the following line in Terminal:
- killall Dock
- The Dock will disappear briefly and reappear with the feature turned on. Close the Terminal and you’re done.
Making Mac Doc Icons Solid Again
- Reopen Terminal and enter the following line:
- defaults write com.apple.Dock showhidden -bool NO
- Refresh the Dock once more with this line in Terminal:
- killall Dock
- Again the Dock will disappear for a few seconds and reappear so the setting can take effect.
Changing Dock Icon Size
- Click the Apple in the top left corner of your screen. Choose “System Preferences” to open the System Preferences applet.
- Click on the “Dock” item in the Personal tab. When the Dock dialog box opens, you’ll see a Size slider bar at the top.
- Drag the slider arrow to the left to make the Dock icons smaller. Conversely, drag it to the right for larger ones. Close the Dock dialog when your icons are the size you want. The changes will be saved automatically.
FAQs
Click on the Apple menu in the top-left corner of your Mac’s screen. Select System Preferences. Click on Dock or Dock & Menu Bar. See if the box next to Automatically hide and show the Dock is checked.
If the Dock is usually hidden, move the cursor to the Dock area to make the Dock appear, then right-click the Dock separator and select Turn Hiding Off. You can also use the Dock separator to access any of the Dock settings quickly.
You can find the option to hide or show the menu bar in System Preferences. Go to System Preferences > Dock & Menu Bar Preferences. Go to the bottom of the pane and select “Automatically hide and show the menu bar in full screen” to make it always appear. Deselect it to make the menu bar NOT appear in full screen mode.