Remove Recent Applications from Dock

By  on  

A Mac user's dock is a sacred place. We customize our dock to no end, and if you're ultra organized like me, you even use dock separators to group your app icons.

Apple recently implemented a feature which displays three recently used apps in the dock. For basic users that's reasonable, but for power users like us, it's an annoyance.

To remove this recent applications feature:

  1. Click the Apple menu, then choose System Preferences
  2. Click the Dock icon
  3. Uncheck the Show recent applications in Dock checkbox

I lived with this invasion of Dock privacy for far too long. Take a moment to cleanse your Dock and you'll feel much better!

Recent Features

  • By
    LightFace:  Facebook Lightbox for MooTools

    One of the web components I've always loved has been Facebook's modal dialog.  This "lightbox" isn't like others:  no dark overlay, no obnoxious animating to size, and it doesn't try to do "too much."  With Facebook's dialog in mind, I've created LightFace:  a Facebook lightbox...

  • By
    CSS @supports

    Feature detection via JavaScript is a client side best practice and for all the right reasons, but unfortunately that same functionality hasn't been available within CSS.  What we end up doing is repeating the same properties multiple times with each browser prefix.  Yuck.  Another thing we...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    MooTools FontChecker Plugin

    There's a very interesting piece of code on Google Code called FontAvailable which does a jQuery-based JavaScript check on a string to check whether or not your system has a specific font based upon its output width. I've ported this functionality to MooTools. The MooTools...

  • By
    MooTools Overlay Plugin

    Overlays have become a big part of modern websites; we can probably attribute that to the numerous lightboxes that use them. I've found a ton of overlay code snippets out there but none of them satisfy my taste in code. Many of them are...

Discussion

  1. zakius

    wow, so the solution is “just go to the expected place and untick one checkbox”
    I guess this may be too much for many of mac users but I doubt they will be able to read text as long as this one either way

    I clicked this cause I was curious what kind of shenanigans, rain dances and unholy sacrifices you had to do but it turned out it was absolutely reasonable!

  2. Speedy

    Actually, mine was already unchecked (I have OS Mohave for a while). I checked and unchecked again, and they are still the same 504 docs under Recents. No way to delete them; unless I delete them manually but it will delete the original docs in my computer.

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!