Tip: Stack your Recent Items in Leopard

Posted by Taylor Sternberg on 11/17/07 in Apple, Tips & Tricks, Utilities

MacApper Tips I’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:

Open the Terminal in Applications > Utilities > Terminal
Type this command into the window:
defaults write com.apple.dock persistent-others -array-add '{ "tile-data" = { "list-type" = 1; }; "tile-type" = "recents-tile"; }'
Type killall Dock to restart the Dock.
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!

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8 Comment(s)

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Pete said on

November 17th, 2007 at 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.

Manna said on

November 17th, 2007 at 2:04 pm

I just did the CTRL+CMD+D

It works in Leopard 10.5.1

Pete said on

November 18th, 2007 at 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.

Laban said on

November 21st, 2007 at 9:03 am

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

Friedmud said on

February 23rd, 2008 at 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?

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Friedmud said on

February 23rd, 2008 at 1:06 am

Nevermind… I figured it out

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ryan.axiom said on

April 25th, 2008 at 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?

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GP said on

August 1st, 2008 at 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…)

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