Tidy Up Your Dock: How to Show Only Open Apps on Your Mac

It is from the Dock of our Mac, the bottom bar, from where we access the apps that we use most often and also those that are in use at the moment. This is how the Dock works by default, but if we want to reduce the space it occupies or the information it displays we can make it show only the open apps.

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The minimalism of displaying only apps in use

It is thanks to a Terminal command that we can modify the behavior of the Dock. A behavior that we will configure to show only the open apps, the ones with a dot underneath, something like a Do Not Disturb mode for apps. Here it is a good idea to take a screenshot of the current layout of the Dock to be able to recover it if we want. Then the steps are these:

1. We open the Terminal app. We can look for it in Spotlight or in the Utilities folder inside Applications.
2. We copy and paste the following command: defaults write com.apple.dock static-only -bool true; killall Dock
3. Press Enter (↵).

That’s all. The Dock will resize instantly and all the apps we have added will disappear except the ones we are running. Accessing the rest of them is as easy as using Launchpad, pinching with four fingers on the trackpad, or thanks to Spotlight.

Restoring the default Dock operation is as simple as repeating the steps we have just seen replacing the command used with this one: defaults write com.apple.dock static-only -bool false; killall Dock

Just as we can customize the home screen of our iPhone, this simple configuration, as we can see, but really interesting when it comes to managing the information we see in the Dock. A configuration designed to adapt to our habits and needs and that we can modify in a couple of clicks.

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