Make hidden dock items transparent ?

[michaelsanford]

I know TinkerTool will do that, and I remember doing it manually in the dock preferences but I can't remember which key to change.

If someone can remind me of which line to edit that would be cool, thanks !

 

[Zammy-Sam]

out of curiosity: why not use TinkerTool?

 

[ora]

From MacosxHints i believe, i had it in a text file:

This hint has worked fine since 10.0, so I was surprised that it wasn't on this site. You can make the items in your dock slightly transparent when they are hidden, so you have a visual cue that they aren't active. Just go into Terminal and type:

defaults write com.apple.dock showhidden -bool true

Then restart the Dock by typing:

killall Dock

Edit: BTW i've did this ages ago and it worked without any problems

 

[michaelsanford]

For some reason that didn't work (maybe it added it to /Library and not ~/Library) but it did give me enough information to add these lines to ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.dock.plist, right after the first key.

        <key>showhidden</key>
        <true/>

Thanks !

 

[Orbit]

wow i neva new of that trick thanks heaps its so kool

 

[ora]

Odd that it didn't work for you Michael, not sure why, seems to work both in jaguar and panther for me. For reference, i got it from here: http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20031027022943749&query=dock+transparent

 

[michaelsanford]

Yeah it is odd that it didn't work, especially since on my iMac's Panther I did it manually in the first place, but on my iBook that key wasn't present in the config file at all. Maybe it was a Cocktail thing...since I think Cocktail will do that too.

Thanks