How to completely disable Dashboard

Dashboard is the kind of thing you either love or hate, using it constantly or not at all. As you may recall, a few days ago we discussed how unused Dashboard widgets can take up a lot of memory and slow your systems performance, we also showed you how to reclaim that memory. For those that don’t use Dashboard at all, we’ll show you how to disable Dashboard completely (but don’t worry it is just as easy to enable it again).

Turning Dashboard off and on is done easily through the Terminal, so your first step is to launch the Terminal. Then follow these simple steps:

Disable Dashboard- type or paste the following exactly into the Terminal window:
defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean YES
Next, kill the currently running Dashboard by killing the Dock (the Dock will reload itself, don’t worry):
killall Dock

That’s it, now Dashboard is completely disabled. Hit F12 and nothing will happen. So what if you had a change of heart and want Dashboard back? Well turning it back on is just as easy.

Enabling Dashboard- type or paste the following exactly into the Terminal window:
defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean NO
Again, kill the Dock, which will reload the now activated Dashboard:
killall Dock

That’s all there is to it! If you don’t want to disable Dashboard completely, but want to regain some of the lost memory that is being hogged by open Widgets, check out this article: Free up System Memory by killing Dashboard widgets