10 Useful Things To Add To the Mac Dock

You can add custom items to the right side of the Dock in macOS. Here are 10 examples of useful things that you can add to make it easier to access apps, files, and more.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let me show you ten useful things that you could add to your Mac Dock.
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So you probably already know that you could add your own custom items to the right side of the Dock. But what are the best items to add there. What will be the most useful. Let's start with a simple one. Just adding the Applications folder. After all you only have a limited amount of space here for applications. So only your most frequently used applications are going to be in the Dock. What if you wanted to have them all there? Well, let's go to a new Finder window and then go to the Applications folder. What if we wanted to add everything in here to the Dock. Let's go up one level. I'm going to Command click here. Go up one level so I can see the Applications folder. Now I'm just going to drag the Applications folder to the right side of the Dock. Now when I click this all the Applications will appear. Let's make it more useful by Control clicking, two finger click on the trackpad or right click on the mouse, and let's change to Display as a Folder so it looks like the Applications folder and then let's have it View Content As a List. Now when I click on it I get this list of all of the apps, including the ability to dive down into subfolders. So now I can literally launch any app that I've got from the Dock. 
Now do note that the LaunchPad icon here, if you click and hold that, will actually give you a very similar looking list. So adding it to the right side of the Dock is only so useful. What will be more useful is a folder that has select applications. Ones that don't appear here but you want them to appear in a little list that pops up when you click. So let's do that. I'm going to go into my Documents folder here and I'm going to create a special folder to hold some of these Dock shortcuts. So New Folder, and I'll just call this Dock. Then in here I'm going to create another folder and I'm going to call that Apps. Now I'm going to go to my Applications folder again and this time I'm going to pick out apps that I want to put in here that will appear in a special area. So let's just put a couple new special ones. Notice just by dragging and dropping it's automatically creating an alias. You can see that little curved arrow there. So I don't have to hold down any keys to create an alias. So I can take whatever apps that I want and stick them in here. Now when I look into this folder you can see all the aliases to those apps. I can drag and drop this to the right side of the Dock and add that in there. Let's change it to show a folder. Let's change it to List View. Now I can open up any of these apps from this list. I can customize it adding more or removing some without having to do anything with the Dock at all. The list will just update to whatever I've got in this folder.
 Now what we did with the Apps folder you can also do with your Documents folder. If you're like me you have everything in your Documents folder. So if I'm in Documents I can go up one level, in this case my Documents folder is in iCloud Drive, and I can drag the Documents folder here to the Dock. Let's go and set it to Folder and List. Now, literally, every file that I've got is in the Dock. I can dig down into Folders and subfolders and get to anything. Or an alternative is just to put an important file there. So, for instance, let's say you have a project that you're working on all the time. You could simply put that folder in there. Then set that up to be the view that you want and you can access anything in that folder. 
Another thing you may want to do is just place a single file there. There's nothing wrong with that. You can drag and drop a single file there and clicking it will simply open that file. In fact this is the one technique here that I actually use. I have one very important Numbers spreadsheet and I put that here in the Dock so I can access it easily even though it really lives deep down inside my Documents folder. Just one click  in the Dock will bring it up. Also you've got Recents as an item here. Probably in Favorites in the Finder and you can add that to the Dock as well. Just Control click on it and then you've got Add To Dock. Now you can see Recents here in the Dock and you could set it up and now you can get to all of your Recent items. 
But what if you want more than one file but you don't want a whole folder or all of your documents there. Well, you could do that same thing we did earlier with Applications. So in the special Dock folder here I'm going to create a New Folder and I'm just going to call this one Docks. Then inside of Docks I can put any documents I want. So I'm going to grab this one but I don't want to move it from its actual location. I want to create an alias or a shortcut to it here. So the original remains in its location. There's just this alias to it. Now the Applications did this automatically since it assumed we didn't want to move the application out of the Applications' folder. But to do it with a document we actually need to hold the Command and Option key together and you could see when I do that I get the curly arrow there meaning I'm creating an alias to this file. The original is exactly where it was before. So I can move a bunch of files with this method and put them in here and they can be deep down inside of other folders. Once I've gathered those altogether I can go and add this Docks folder here. Let's set that up as a Folder. I'll set it up as a List. I can go in and access any of these files. The original files are still exactly where they were before. I just have an alias here in the Docks folder and that will automatically update any new alias I add in Docks will appear here in the Dock. Anything that I remove from here will disappear from here. So I can just update this as I want.
Now if my idea of adding Recents to the Dock is one you like, but Recents isn't exactly what you want you can create your own Smart Folder. So create a new Smart Folder first let's go to the Root Directory that I want to search. So in this case let's go to the Documents folder here. That's where I want the search to take place. Then I'm going to create a new Smart Folder. I'm going to say yes start in the Documents folder. I'm going to add some criteria here. Last Opened Date is within the last 120 days. Let's say the Kind is a Document. Then I'm going to Save. I'm going to Save this in the Documents folder inside that Dock folder that I created. I'll call this Recents. Then when I look in that Dock folder here I've got this Recents Smart Folder. Let's drag it to the Dock. I'll set it to display like I want as a List. Now I'm going to see the recently opened documents right here. I could even, in this case, take advantage of the sorting Sort By. Instead of by Last Opened or by Name. 
Now here's another way to have select files appear in the Dock. Instead of creating a Smart Folder we're simply going to apply Tags to files. So I'm going to select a file like this and then go to File, and then Tags and I'm going to add a new tag. I'm going to call this tag In Dock. You can call it anything you want. Then I'm going to apply that same tag to another file. Let's do it to this one here. I'll do Tags and then In Dock. Let's take one last file here. This one. I'm actually doing Command i this time. Then here at the top for Tags I'll do In Dock. Now if I ever want to see all of the files that have In Dock applied as a Tag I could look here under Tags, if you don't see this you can expand this on the left on the left Sidebar, click on In Dock and there are those files. I can also drag any tag from this sidebar into the Dock. So now I've got this tag here. Let's go and to the Folder, List and now I can click here and you can see those files. In fact I could select another file like this one. I can apply that same tag. Now I've got four files and they'll all be listed here. I could also then remove the tag from a file and that change will be reflected here as well. Sometimes though it takes a few seconds for this List to update after you change a tag. 
Another idea is to add Bookmarks to the Dock. So I'm going to go and create a New Folder in that same special Dock folder we created. Call it Bookmarks. Let's add that to the Dock. Now let's go to Safari here. I'm going to drag the address here into Bookmarks. That will create, you can see this little web link there. Let's do it for this one. Let's do it for this one. Now when I look here I can see those bookmarks. I can even create subfolders if I want. So these are bookmarks completely outside of the web browser. They are just these little tiny files that are web links. A cool thing about them is not only do they go to the webpage but they even will launch the browser if the browser isn't running. So I can just click on it and it goes right to the page.
So here's a bonus one. You could put direct links to System Preferences inside of the Dock here. Now you may already have System Preferences, like I do here, and you can just click on that and go to System Preferences. But this will allow you to go directly to a System Preference Section or Pane. So what you need to do is go to the Computer Level and then into your hard drive into System and then into Library. Then look for Preference Pane. Go in there and you'll find all the Preference panes in there. Let's take one. For instance Sound. I'm going to drag that to the right side of the Dock. Now when I click on that it goes into System Preferences directly to Sound. But do note that you can also click and hold System Preferences and then you have a list of all of the panes and you can go directly to one as well.
Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 5 Responses to “10 Useful Things To Add To the Mac Dock”

nick

3 years ago

hey Gary, great tips (I didn't realize that by clicking and holding Launchpad would show the app list), but just wanted to say that having gotten used to Spotlight Search I find it to be the quickest way to apps and docs. I'm a minimalist so like a sparse desktop, but one nice thing about Macs, there are multiple ways to get things done.

Roger

Thank you! As Nick said, in showing us new ways to use the dock, you also taught/reminded us about existing features (like click and hold on System Preferences). I appreciate that while you are showing something, you frequently show a couple of ways to do it, teaching us even more. MacMost is a great resource!

Jackie B

Great to learn about alias files. What do you mean by curly arrow to show that file is an alias file? Sounds like with an alias file you can store a file or document in more than one folder; and all will update. I have been creating duplicate files & labeling the original one as a duplicate does not simultaneously update the same document in another folder. Is there a link explaining more about alias files & how to create them? Also is there a way to see where all the alias files are located?

Gary Rosenzweig

Jackie: With aliases, the file is only in one location. The alias is in the second location and you can use that to access to file. But the real file is only in the one place. See https://macmost.com/using-mac-aliases.html

Ernie G

Liked the folder shortcuts for apps and frequently used docs in the dock. Played around a bit more and if you apply a custom icon for the folder before you transfer to the dock, that icon is carried down. Makes it super easy to identify which folder is which.

Comments Closed.

10 Useful Things To Add To the Mac Dock

Comments: 5 Responses to “10 Useful Things To Add To the Mac Dock”

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