Tips To Get the Most From the Mac Dock

Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let me show you some tips to get the most from your Dock.

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So the Dock, of course, is an important tool for everybody that uses a Mac. But there are some hidden features in the Dock that you may not know about. Now of course when you simply click an app in the Dock it will simply launch that app. But you can access other functions one of three ways. You can click and hold and wait for a menu to appear. You could also use two fingers on a trackpad and click and the menu appears immediately. You can hold the Control key on your keyboard and click. 

Now the first thing I want to show you is that you can see open windows when you do this. So, for instance, for Safari I could see I've got three windows open. You may not see these because either they are hidden, like you've hidden the entire app, they're minimized or, in my case, they are on a different screen. But I could select any one of these three windows and it will bring that one to the front. Now in addition to open windows if an app edits documents, like say Pages, you'll also see recently accessed files. So here I can see two windows and you could see the little window icon there next to each item. But above that I see files that I've recently accessed. So I can recently open a recent document in Pages by simply accessing this menu and selecting the document. It will open Pages with that document. 

Now you can also drag items to the Dock. So, for instance, if I wanted to open this Pages document I could drag it from the Finder to Pages. But it particularly helps in cases where you could open a document with several different apps.  So for instance this RTF document here can be opened in TextEdit, it can open in a variety of other text editors I may have, and Pages. So if I want to open it in Pages instead of the default app I can simply drag it to Pages. 

Of course you can Launch apps from the Dock but you can also Quit apps from the Dock. So for instance if I wanted to Quit Pages I could access the menu. You could see the bottom item here is Quit. You can also use Modifier keys for the Dock. If you hold the Command key down and then click on an item in the Dock instead of launching that app or opening that document it will open up a Finder window and show you the location of that item. It also works if you put documents on the right side of the Dock and then you Command click on that it will show you where that document is. 

Now you can Launch apps from the Dock, you can Quit apps with the Dock, but you could also Hide apps with the Dock. You can get to that by bringing up the menu and then Hide is the second item from the bottom. But you could also simply Option click and it will Hide that app. Now if you Shift Option click it will kind of do the opposite. It will Unhide that app or bring it to the front and Hide everything else. 

Now several apps have special controls in their menu. For instance Safari gives you the ability to open a New Window or a New Private Window without having to first bring the app to the front and then use the menu. Mail will let you get new mail and also Compose a New Message right from this menu. The catch is Mail already has to be running for these to appear here. The same is true for Music. If Music is already running even if it's hidden you can access this menu and then you have a lot of controls. Like Play, Next, Previous, Shuffle, Repeat Options, Like and Dislike, and also a Now Playing List at the top. 

If you have System Preferences in the Dock you don't have to just click on it to Launch it and then go to the preference you want. You can access this menu and you have a list of all of the different sections of System Preferences. You can go right to anyone that you want. Likewise in LaunchPad you get a list of all of the apps in LaunchPad. So you can jump to anyone of those. Now in System Preferences and LaunchPad you can use the keyboard to make this even better. So I'm going to Control click here and then type the letter p and it jumps right to Pages and then I could hit Return and it will Launch Pages. 

Now one last one. If you've got Activity Monitor in the Dock once you launch it you can access some special features. Go into Control click on it and you could see I've got Dock icon here. I can make the Dock icon, instead of being just a static image, show something. Like for instance show CPU usage. Or I can have it show the history, a little graph, which will give me a little graph that will fill in over time. I could also choose Network Usage and Disk Activity or switch back to just the plain app icon. So now you could see after awhile it's filled in the graph down here and I can continue to monitor it even if I Hide Activity Monitor. I have to keep it running but I can have it hidden. Now I have this little way to check my network status or CPU use or whatever in an icon in the Dock.