Make Hidden Application Icons Translucent in the Dock
Notice anything different about that Dock? Some of the icons are translucent, and that is because they are hidden apps. You can enable this great feature yourself by entering the following command into the Terminal:
defaults write com.apple.Dock showhidden -bool YES
Then you have to kill the Dock for the changes to take effect
killall Dock
Now anytime you hide an application (Option+Click on the Desktop to hide the current application) the icon will turn transparent in the Mac OS X Dock. You can reverse this setting and have the icons visible as usual hidden or not by typing:
defaults write com.apple.Dock showhidden -bool NO
Then you must kill the Dock again for the changes to take effect and hidden app icons will no longer be transparent.
Thank you to Tyler Harden for sending in this tip!
This is just an aesthetic consideration, right. Right now I know that an app is hidden when a) I can’t see it on the screen, and b) there’s a dot under its dock icon. Or am I missing something? (A very real possibility.)
Yes, this is aesthetics only, it just makes it easier to spot the hidden apps
Well, If you configured System Preferences…/Dock to
“Minimize windows into application icon”
and iconized all windows of an application, they are not on the screen or on the Dock, but you will see them using Exposé.
Once an application is hidden, it’s windows do neither show up on the screen, nor on Exposé, nor on the Dock; regardless if they are iconized or not.
So there is a marginal difference.
If an app is running, it has a little dot in the Dock, if it’s hidden, the dot is transparent. This is a marginal difference and I only just recognized it (since I never used the hide-feature).
The tip described here changes the icon of hidden apps to be transparent when normally only it’s little dot is.
Guess I got it now
Good. Thanks for the reply.
[...] [Fonte originaria del tip] [...]
[...] would recommend combining both of these tips with the ability to make hidden application icons translucent within the Dock, it’s a simple Terminal command to activate and it helps to determine which apps are hidden [...]
In 10.6.4, it seems that the ability to make the Dock icons transparent is missing. When I hide/show a docked app, I see no change in the icon nor the dot below it. When I ran “defaults read com.apple.Dock showhidden” I got the error message “The domain/default pair of (com.apple.Dock, showhidden) does not exist”.
The only time I see the icons dim or grow more transparent is when I bring up the contextual menu (right-click/control-click).
I don’t have this problem. It could be that I’ve used OnyX before.
Update: I was able to make the dot transparent using OnyX (Parameters->Dock->Use Transparent icons…).
[...] Make the dock icons dim a bit for apps that are hidden with this tip. [...]
[...] keystroke is best paired with a defaults command that makes hidden app icons transparent in the Dock, giving you a simple visual indicator of what’s hidden and what’s [...]
[...] a specific app to hide it as you begin working elsewhere. Hidden apps are easy to identify if you enable translucent icons in the [...]