Create a Custom Quick Access Dock Folder

You can create a single item in the Dock on your Mac that contains links to your most used files, folders, apps, web links and more.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how you can create a quick access folder for your Mac's Dock.
Let's say you have some things that you access all the time. Some files, some folders, some websites, maybe some applications, maybe some other things that you do. It would be great to be able to have a menu where you can quickly access these. It turns out you can pretty easily create this for the Dock.
Now I'm going to start off here in the Documents folder, which is a great place to create folders for all sorts of purposes. I'm going to create a folder in Documents called Quick Access. You can name it anything you like. Once I have this folder, it's just empty and sitting there, I'm going to add it to the Dock. The way to do that is to drag the folder and put it on the right side of the Dock. It has got to be near the Trashcan here. I'm going to stick it right there. You can see I've got this folder called Quick Access in the Dock. It can't go on the left. That's for applications only. So once you've got it there you can now put things into this folder and you can access them in the Dock.
I'm going to dig down into this folder here and move this window over to the right and have a new Finder Window and we'll use this to find things to put in here. So, for instance, let's start off by looking in this folder called Business. I've got a file here that I access all the time called Balances. It is a Numbers spreadsheet. I want to put this in here. Now I don't want to just drag it over because you can see it moves it from that location and now it lives in the Quick Access folder. I'm going to put it back and instead I'm going to drag it over, BUT I'm going to hold down the Command and Option Key at the same time. Notice how the little curved arrow appears there next to the icon. Now when I drop it here I get it here and here. This is actually where the file lives. It's in Documents, in Business. This is an alias or shortcut to this file. So you can double click this icon here and it actually opens up this file here.
Let's go and add some other things. In the Current folder here I've got something called Project Notes. It's a text file. Let me do the same thing here. I'm going to hold Command Option and have it alias to this file here. Now I'm going to go down to my Personal folder and I've got a file called Journals. It's a Pages file. I'm going to also add an alias to it here. So now I've got these three files. If I go down now to the Dock and click on this Quick Access folder you can see I can access any of these files pretty easily. I click on it and it will actually open up this alias which then in turn opens up the actual original file. So, for this Project Notes text file I just click on it there and it opens up.
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Now next let's customize how this looks. Instead of using a little stack like that I'm going to Control Click, right click or two-finger click on a trackpad on this Dock Icon. I'm going to change the display as a folder. We're going to customize that later. Now I'm also going to go in here and I'm going to change View Content As to a List instead of automatic. So now when I click here I get this nice little compact list that shows these three files. Let's go and add more here. Let's say we want to add Folders as well. So, this Current folder could be handy to have here. Let's go and drag that over and I'm going to hold down Command Option to create an alias. Make sure you do that or you'll be moving the folder over. Let's add some other folders. Let's add this Projects folder here. Again Command and Option to do an alias, and let's do this Receipts folder as well. Now we have three folders here and we can now click here and we can see that we've got Folders as well as Files.
Now it would be nice to be able to actually dig down into the folder. Here I can actually select this folder and it opens up the folder in a New Finder Window. But it would be nice to actually be able to dig down into it. It turns out you can. It's just that the Dock is a little slow sometimes and has to realize this is an alias to a folder, not an alias to a file. Let's go into Options here and then change Sort By to Kind. But I"m just going to change it right back to Name. Then now I can see it's realized that those are Folders and now I can actually look at one and it gives me a list of all the files there. I can look at this one and it gives me a list of all the files in there. So it is easy to access the files in these folders. You can even go and dig down into the subfolders here. You have access to all the files in those.
Let's not stop with Files and Folders. Let's do Applications as well. So in the Finder Window here I'm going to choose Go and I'm going to go to Applications which goes to the main level of Applications Folder. Let's say we want to add some Quick Access to various applications. The Passwords App is a good one. If I drag it over here notice it automatically creates an alias for it. I don't have to hold down the Option and Command. It's because it knows it is not supposed to be moving the application out of the Applications's Folder. So let's move that one there. Let's put Pixelmator Pro over there. Let's go and also choose my favorite Text Editor here, Cut Editor. So now we've got Applications there. I can click there and I can see the applications are all intermingled there.
Let's add Links. So I'm going to go in Safari here to a website and I can drag right here. I have to grab right in the middle of the address right there. I can drag this over. What it is going to do is create a file that's a little web link. So let's go and do it for that and let's do it for the Apple site as well. You can see now I've got that. You can see apple.weblock. So now I can look here and I can see these. If I want to go to one of these websites I can click here and it goes to it.
So now I've got Files. I've got Folders. I've got Apps and I've got websites. You can do even more than that. So, for instance, let's go into the Shortcuts App here. The Shortcuts App allows you to do all sorts of things. For instance, I've got this shortcut from a previous tutorial that gives you instant access to the System Preferences Text Replacement Section. So if I wanted to add that there I can simply select this and choose File and then Add to Dock. What it is going to do is it is going to create a little mini-app and then put it here in the Dock. We want it to be over here in Quick Access. So I'm going to Control Click on it and choose Options and Show In Finder. It will open up the Applications Folder. This is my User Account Applications Folder. Now the main one. There's the little app. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to drag this little app into the Quick Access Folder. It will move it from there, which is fine. I'm also going to remove it here from the Dock, I don't need it there, but I will find it under Quick Access and it is listed there. I can actually use this as a shortcut and in this case it takes me right to Text Replacements.
Here's another one I created that uses a simple Send email action to send an email to one of my contacts and it just fills in a little subject and body right there. If I were to do the same thing here, I'll chose File, Add to Dock. Drag it over. Going to remove it from the Dock there and now I've got this email Joe item here. I can select that and it executes that shortcut which opens up this little email here. There's all sorts of different shortcuts you can create to do lots of different things. Those are just two examples.
Now let's continue to customize this a bit. If you notice if you Control click on this here I can change the Sort By to Kind. So right now I see everything mixed in. It's all alphabetical. Let's do Sort By and then Kind. Now you can see the order is different. You can see here that the files and folders, they are all mixed together. But the little apps here are separate and so are the little web links. You can rename things here in this Quick Access folder. The aliases don't have to have the same name as the original item. So, for instance, let's say I want to number the files here. So here's that Journal. Let's make that number 1. I'll just put 1 space Journal. If I go to my Documents folder here and I look in Personal, where that journal is, you can see the journal name is still the same. So I can rename these to be something more convenient for sorting. I can do Project Notes as 2 and I can do Balances here as 3. This is nice because now I can look and these are all together like that. I can put them in any order I want.
Let's get the Folders all together too. We can put something like we can rename this as Folder Current or we can use a special character. I'm going to use Control Command Space to bring up the Emoji & Special Character Viewer. I can search here for Folder and use one of these. I'm going to use this one right here. I'm going to put a little folder icon there. I'm actually going to Copy that and I'm going to Paste it here for each one of those, like that. So now this is what it looks like. Those folders are together because alphabetically they start with the same character. I've got my files in order there. You can even go further if you want and you can create folders inside of Quick Access.
So I'm going to create a new folder here and let's go and call this Apps. Let's move the apps in there. So there is Pixelmator, Passwords, and CutEditor. I'll put them in there. Let's create another folder. We'll call this Links and let's move this one in here. This has got a really long name. It's taken from the title of the page. I'll just rename this, make it shorter, and I'll move this one in here. Now we can go here and I can see there's Apps, there are my apps, and Links, there are my links. So I can kind of organize this by creating these subfolders as well.
There's one last thing. Let's go and make this to be a better icon. So I've actually have a graphic here. This is just a png file. So you can create this in your favorite Image Editing app. You can download icons from online. You can just, you know, have this icon here. You can see it in Preview. I'm going to select all in Preview and Copy. You could also just copy this file here though sometimes the Finder has difficulty with that. I'm going to go to Quick Access here. I'm actually going to go up a level, Command Click here and go up to Documents, and select Quick Access right there. Do File and then Get Into. Click here, right on this icon here in the Get Info window, and Command V to paste. It will paste this custom icon here. Now notice that custom icon is reflected in the Dock. So I can have this be a folder or picture or anything I want here. It is just a little nicer to be able to spot it with a custom icon. Now you have access to all these different things and you can always go back into the Quick Access folder to add more things, remove things you no longer using, reorganize things, rename things. Continue to work with this. Update it to have the items you need quick access to, all in this one little item here on the right side of your Dock.
Like I said you can use shortcuts that add all sorts of different items here that do different things. I'm just showing a quick example of some of the things you can add. Really the sky is the limit. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 16 Responses to “Create a Custom Quick Access Dock Folder”

Joel

1 month ago

Gary, awesome video! Desktop super clean now! One of the best ever! Quick question, I did the Name > Kind > Name trick and the folders are now searchable but, as in the video, the folders in Quick Access have a white "file" icon rather than a blue "folder" icon. Would appreciate thoughts on how to get them to have a blue folder icon. Thx!

Gary, apologies but I do not understand your above response. Can you please clarify. Thank you.

Gary Rosenzweig

Joel: Sorry, yes, that got kinda garbled. I don't think there is any way to get it to appear as a blue folder. That's why I suggested using the emoji character like you see.

Gary, as always, appreciated and understood. Too bad! Thanks for the response!

Saqwon

Macmost is the best I learned how to sort out my files with Quicklinks on video was informative it gave sense of direction on where to store certain folders/ files.

Andrew Brown

Gary, this is a great video~! I've used short-cuts/aliases in Windows for years (at work), but never really thought about it in MacOS (at home). Great to know~! I'm transitioning from my iMac to my new Mini M4 and creating a Quick Access Folder will be the next thing that I do. Thanks much for the great idea~!!

Christine

This video is pure genius! Thank you for helping to streamline my workflow!

EMRE

A very useful video, my desktop is much cleaner, thank you Gary !

Carmen Farmer

I could get an Application (System Settings) copy moved over to the Quick Access folder, but when I held down Command + Option to try to put a document in the Quick Access folder, nothing happens. I tried this many times. Any suggestions?

Carmen: Are you dragging it into the actual folder in a Finder window? Do that. You can't drag it into the Dock.

Great trick, thx Gary!

Michael

Thanks Gary. Brilliantly useful tutorial. Has a huge effect on quick access to many areas and keeping everything tidy. One of your best. Regards Michael

Sheldon

Thanks bunches

Melody Whitaker

4 weeks ago

Love the Quick Access Folder! Oh and especially the way to customize the picture on the folder! You show the ‘funnest” and most helpful stuff! 😍

Joan Boes

3 weeks ago

How do you get the emoji at the front of the renamed folder ? When I try to move/copy an emoji , it creates a separate "text clipping" file ..I got how you do a ctrl Command Space to access the emoji folder, but I didn't catch how to attach an emoji to the renamed folder. Can you explain Please ?

Joan: Just type it there. Position your text cursor in the file name like you about to type a letter. Then Use Control+Command+Space and select an emoji.

Create a Custom Quick Access Dock Folder

Comments: 16 Responses to “Create a Custom Quick Access Dock Folder”

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