It may have little left and with the presentation of the new macOS you are waiting like rain in May (June) for it to reach our Mac, but for now and until that happens you can give a touch of originality to your computer by customizing the dock in your macOS Ventura. It’s a good idea if you’re a bit sick of always having the same composition. In this post we show how it is done and you will realize that it is not difficult at all. Go for it.
Customizing the dock of our Mac, in this case with macOS Ventura, is not only for aesthetics but also we can gain in functionality since there are a series of adjustments that we can touch and get better performance.
The first thing we have to do is customize the Dock in macOS, and for that we have to go to System Settings->Desktop and there look for the Dock option from the Apple menu in the macOS menu bar. Most of the Dock-related items are at the top of this settings panel.
We met with two controls as sliders. One of them controls the size of the dock. That is, if we want it to occupy more or less space on the screen. The other controls the level of the magnifying glass at the moment in which we pass the mouse pointer over the dock. That is, if we want it to be displayed more or less large.
We can also change dock position on the screen thanks to a pop-up menu that we have. We can place it to the left, below or to the right. Knowing that below is the default place in macOS.
The next item that we can modify it is the one of the windows, being able to minimize them and controlling the animation that arises when we do so. If we turn on the minimize option, the Finder reduces the window to its main application and adds it to a popup menu when you click a window’s yellow minimize button. We can always access the reduced window by Control-clicking or right-clicking on the application icon in the Dock.
Another of the options that are most customized, I mean, what is most used when customizing the dock, is that can be hidden automatically the same and so the screen has a cleaner appearance.
Another of the most used options is add or remove items from the Dock. Those that we do not use too many and, on the contrary, add those that we are always accessing. Also taking into account that we can add folders. To delete there is nothing more than to hold down the icon that we want to remove and drag it out of the dock. To add we do the opposite. We drag from outside the application that we want to add to the dock and that’s it.
As for the folders, to be able to add them, is also very easy. Once folders are added to the Dock, in the manner indicated above, keeping in mind that they will always stay on the right. When we have the folders added, we can hold down the Control key and click or right-click on them to get a popup menu for customization. With that menu, you can change how folder items are ordered, display a folder as a stack, change how the content appears when the item is clicked, and other options.
A couple of details to take into account regarding the customization of the folders. The most useful are the option View content as menu in List. This way the next time we click on the folder, the Finder will show a popup window with a simple vertical list of the folder’s contents. We can adjust it so that the content is displayed to us as something similar to an accordion or as a grid. But the best is as a list. Give it a try and tell me if I’m wrong.
As a curious thing, you should know that when you customize the dock, those preferences are saved in a file on the Mac. It is an XML file called com.apple.dock.plist located on your startup disk in /Users/~/Library/Preferences/. You can modify the dock, modifying the file but you have to know what you are doing because we can damage it and spoil everything.
It is good to know that this file exists because if we do not like how it turned out, what we have to do is restore the Dock to its original state. To do this, we delete the file and restart the Mac.
I hope this little tutorial will help you, which as you can see and I told you at the beginning is quite simple to do. A way to have a new screen every time simply by modifying our dock, which is something that we are constantly seeing and that we can take advantage of to make it more functional, especially with folders.
