Tip: Stack your Recent Items in Leopard

MacApper TipsI’m just going to say it: I am one of the people who really love the Leopard dock. I love stacks: I think it’s elegant, quick, and makes my PC friends drool.

Like everyone else, I’m always looking for ways to make my dock more productive. Thankfully, this tip, via macosxhints.com, teaches you how to make a recent items folder for the dock.

You can add a Recent Applications, Recent Documents, Recent Servers, Favorite Volumes, or Favorite Items stack to the dock. After the trick is applied, a “Recent 10 Things” stack will appear (but only expand into tile mode).

The steps are really simple:

  1. Open the Terminal in Applications > Utilities > Terminal
  2. Type this command into the window:
    defaults write com.apple.dock persistent-others -array-add '{ "tile-data" = { "list-type" = 1; }; "tile-type" = "recents-tile"; }'
  3. Type killall Dock to restart the Dock.
  4. Look down to your Dock, and you should see a new folder on the right. Click and hold, or control click to get a contextual menu which will present you with the 5 types of things to display.

Recent Stacks

If you don’t like the new Dock addition, there is also a Remove From Dock command in the contextual menu. Voila!

Comments

11 Responses to “Tip: Stack your Recent Items in Leopard”

  1. Pete on November 17th, 2007 11:35 am

    The cynic in me believes that Apple hides these useful features just to keep the various tech blogs talking about them. It is very cool though, I’ll give you that.

    By the way, has anyone noticed that the ctrl+cmd+d dictionary shortcut no longer works as well in Leopard? If you do it on an unrecognised word, it no longer shows any response (used to just tell you it was unrecognised). Some words, like ‘vapidly’, show up in the dictionary app but give no response with the shortcut in Leopard.

  2. Manna on November 17th, 2007 2:04 pm

    I just did the CTRL+CMD+D

    It works in Leopard 10.5.1 :)

  3. Pete on November 18th, 2007 7:44 am

    Not on unrecognised words it doesn’t. It should at least acknowledge that you’ve done something, not leave you sitting there wondering if you got the combination right.

  4. Laban on November 21st, 2007 9:03 am

    Just ‘right click’ the word and click the dictionary contextual item, voila!

  5. Ultimate Leopard Customization Guide | MacApper on December 5th, 2007 6:09 am

    [...] Recent-ize it! in the terminal [...]

  6. Friedmud on February 23rd, 2008 12:51 am

    I tried this… and now my dock won’t start! If I look at ‘top’ in the terminal it looks like ReportCrash keeps running… leading me to believe that the Dock keeps crashing over and over again.

    Is there a way to remove this without the dock needing to start?

  7. Friedmud on February 23rd, 2008 1:06 am

    Nevermind… I figured it out

  8. ryan.axiom on April 25th, 2008 3:20 pm

    Dictionary works in 1.5.2. Says “no entries found” when looking up CTRL.

    Does anyone know if you can make more than one of these items in the dock (one for apps and one for docs?) instead of switching between them?

  9. GP on August 1st, 2008 12:40 am

    If you want several of these icons, just repeat that command in Terminal a few times before running ‘killall Dock’…

    Personally, I’ve got four of them (Recent Apps, Recent Docs, Fav Apps, Fav Volumes) down near the trash can…

    Now if only I could somehow get them to the extreme LEFT OF THE DOC by the Finder icon, where my mouse-hand tendencies first looks for them! (Hoping to overcome that ‘Start button’ muscle memory…)

  10. Ana on February 9th, 2009 3:23 am

    I did exactly the way you have described it to do. Now my DOCK crashes and doesn’t appear whatsoever. How can I fix this?

  11. snio on November 3rd, 2009 1:04 am

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