Icon settings; Taskbar; macOS Sierra. The latest version of Apple's operating system was released only half a year ago, in September 2016, and is named macOS Sierra. It is the first OS that bears the new 'macOS' name instead of the 'Mac OS X' that we were used to. MacOS Sierra is the successor of OS X El Capitan, and got its name from the.
Every Mac user knows the Dock—it sits at the bottom of the screen, giving you quick access to your favorite and currently open apps and folders. Using the Mac Dock shortcuts, you can launch Finder and Launchpad, throw files into the Trash folder, as well as access your Downloads folder directly.
To keep your Dock icons tidy, you can begin to categorize the apps onto your Dock into shortcut folders. This will let you organize the Dock better, reducing clutter and letting you focus on your most important apps. Here’s how you can create Mac Dock shortcuts quickly, as well as some tips on how to use the Dock more effectively.
Customizing Mac Dock Shortcuts
Before you begin adding Mac Dock shortcuts, you should customize it to suit your needs. You can change the size of the Dock, including the size of the icons, as well as reposition the Dock from the bottom to the left or right side of your screen. You can also set the Dock to automatically hide when you’re not using it.
To access the settings for the Dock, right-click the Dock area and click Dock Preferences. Alternatively, click the Apple menu in the top-right, then click System Preferences > Dock or launch System Preferences from the Launchpad.
Free Custom Icon
Modify the sliders to increase the size of your Dock app icons, or use the radio buttons to change the position of the Dock. Click the Automatically hide and show the Dock checkbox if you want the Dock to disappear when it isn’t being used.
Once you’ve made your changes, close the Dock settings window. The changes you make will be applied automatically.
Adding New Mac Dock Shortcuts
When you first set up a Mac, a few default apps are already in place as Dock shortcuts. These include Launchpad, Finder, and various Apple apps like FaceTime and Photos. Any software that is currently running will appear next to these icons in the Dock.
To add running apps to your Dock permanently, right-click on an app icon in the Dock, hover over Options, then click Keep in Dock.
You can also remove surplus apps from your Dock using the same menu. For system apps, right-click the app icon, then click Options > Remove from Dock. For non-system apps, simply uncheck the Keep in Dock icon to remove it.
Once your app icons are in place, you can move them around using your mouse or touchpad to suit your needs by dragging the icon and moving it to a new position.
Adding New Mac Dock Shortcut Folders
Shortcut folders help you categorize your Mac Dock shortcuts into categories. Work apps, for instance, could be placed in a single folder, while games could be separated into another.
While Dock shortcut folders won’t hide running apps, they can give you easy access to launch any software you run often without cluttering the Dock or having to launch the app from Finder or Launchpad instead.
To start, open Finder by clicking the Finder icon in the Dock. Head to your Desktop folder, then right-click and press New Folder to create a new folder. Give this a name like Dock Folders. Inside this folder, create another folder (or several new folders) to match the app groupings you want to create on your Dock, giving them a suitable name as you do.
With your folders created, open a second Finder window by right-clicking the Finder icon, pressing New Finder Window, then open the Applications folder in the left-hand menu. Right-click (or press Control + click) on any app you wish to create a shortcut of, then click Make Alias.
A new listing for your chosen app will appear in the Applications folder, with the word alias attached to the name. With both Finder windows visible on your screen, drag the alias app from your Applications folder to the shortcut folder you’ve created on your Desktop.
Repeat the step until you’ve created shortcuts for all of your chosen Dock apps and placed them in suitable folders. Once the Dock shortcut folders are ready, drag the shortcut folders using your mouse onto the Folders area of the Dock, next to your Trash icon.
With the shortcut folder in place, you can access your apps by clicking on the shortcut folder icon and pressing one of the app shortcuts within.
As the Dock shortcut folder is itself a shortcut to a folder, you can open it in Finder to add or remove apps by retracing the steps above. Right-click any app in your Dock shortcuts folder in Finder and press Move to Trash to remove it.
Using Keyboard Dock Shortcuts
If you want to start using your Dock better, then consider using keyboard shortcuts. These time-saving shortcuts will help you interact with the Dock using only your keyboard, saving you the extra time it would take you to use your mouse or trackpad.
Option + Command + D: Hides the Dock or makes it reappear if it’s already hidden.
Command + M: Minimizes an open window to the Dock.
Control + Shift + Command + T: Adds an item in Finder as a Dock shortcut quickly.
Control + F3 (or Control + Function + F3): Assume keyboard control of the Dock, allowing you to move around it with your keyboard keys.
With the Dock keyboard control shortcut above used, press the Up arrow to access the Dock menu, or Return to open an app or shortcut folder. With an app icon selected, press Command + Return to open the location of that app or shortcut in a new Finder window.
To hide all open windows except for the app icon selected, use the arrow keys to select an app icon, then press Command + Option + Return. This will minimize other apps, leaving only your chosen app in view.
How to Use the Dock More Effectively
Adding Mac Dock shortcuts and organizing them into folders is just one way you can use the Dock more effectively on macOS. As we’ve mentioned, you could decide to use macOS keyboard shortcuts to quickly launch apps from your Dock, or customize the Dock to list recent apps in their own folder.
If you’re running Windows, you can install your own third-party Windows app docks instead.
An alias is a tiny file that automatically opens the file that it represents. Although an alias is technically an icon, it’s actually an icon that opens another icon automatically. You can put aliases in convenient places, such as on the Desktop, to help you easily open programs and files that you access often.
In effect, Microsoft stole the alias feature from Apple (if you’ve used Windows, you may know aliases as shortcuts). However, aliases usually don’t break when you move or rename the original file; shortcuts do.
An alias is different from a duplicated file. For example, the Microsoft Word 2004 application uses 19.4 megabytes (MB) of disk space. A duplicate of Microsoft Word 2004 would give you two files, each requiring nearly 20 megabytes of space on your hard drive. An alias of Microsoft Word 2004, on the other hand, uses a mere 52 kilobytes (KB).
Aliases can open any file or folder on any disk from anywhere else on any disk — which is a very good trick. But aliases are great for many other reasons:
Convenience: Aliases enable you to make items appear to be in more than one place, which on many occasions is exactly what you want to do. For example, keeping an alias of your word processor on your Desktop and another on the Dock is convenient. You may even want a third alias of it in your Documents folder for quick access. Aliases enable you to open your word processor quickly and easily without navigating into the depths of your Applications folder each time that you need it.
Flexibility and organization: You can create aliases and store them anywhere on your hard disk to represent the same document in several different folders. This is a great help when you need to file a document that can logically be stored in any one of several files. For example: If you write a memo to Fred Smith about the Smythe Marketing Campaign to be executed in the fourth quarter, which folder does the document go in? Smith? Smythe? Marketing? Memos? 4th Quarter? Correct answer: With aliases, it can go in all of them if you like. Then you can find the memo wherever you look, instead of guessing which folder you filed it in.
With aliases, it doesn’t matter. You can put the actual file in any folder and then create aliases of the file, placing them in any other applicable folder.
Integrity: Some programs must remain in the same folder as their supporting files and folders. Many Classic programs, for example, don’t function properly unless they’re in the same folder as their dictionaries, thesauruses, data files (for games), templates, and so on. Thus, you can’t put the icon for those programs on the Desktop without impairing their functionality. An alias lets you access a program like that from anywhere on your hard disk.
Creating aliases
When you create an alias, its icon looks the same as the icon that it represents, but the suffix alias is tacked onto its name and a tiny arrow called a badge appears in the lower-left corner of its icon. Figure 1 shows both an alias and its parent icon (that is, the icon that opens if you open the alias).
Figure 1: An alias icon (right) and its parent.
To create an alias for an icon, do one of the following:
Click the parent icon and choose File –> Make Alias.
Click the parent icon and press Command+L.
Click any file or folder, press and hold down the Command and Option keys, and then drag the file or folder while continuing to hold down the Command and Option keys.
Presto! An alias appears where you release the mouse button. Better still, aliases created this way don’t have that pesky alias suffix tacked onto them.
Click an icon while holding down the Control key and then choose the Make Alias command from the contextual menu that appears.
The alias appears in the same folder as its parent.
Deleting aliases
Deleting an alias is an easy chore. To delete an alias, simply drag it onto the Trash icon on the Dock. That’s it! You can also Control-click it and choose Move to Trash from the contextual menu that appears, or select the icon and use the keyboard shortcut Command+Delete.
Deleting an alias does not delete the parent item. (If you want to delete the parent item, you have to go hunt it down and kill it yourself.)
Hunting down an alias’ parent
Suppose that you create an alias of a file, and later you want to delete both the alias and its parent file — but you can’t find the parent file? What do you do? Well, you can use the Finder’s Find function (try saying that three times real fast) to find it, but here are three faster ways to find the parent icon of an alias:
Select the alias icon and choose File –> Show Original.
Select the alias icon and use the keyboard shortcut Command+R.
Control-click the alias icon and choose Show Original from the contextual menu.