Add Recent Applications to the Dock in OS X

Posted by Rachel Baker on December 26, 2008 | Post type: Gain

I often find myself using certain applications often enough that I wanted a quick way to access them, but not often enough to require an individual icon on my Dock. To solve this problem I made a stack on my dock that will pull up my recent applications.

Screenshot of Mac OS X Dock

To create this stack, open the Terminal window, found under Utilities, and paste (all on one line) in the following and hit enter:

defaults write com.apple.dock persistent-others -array-add '{ "tile-data" = { "list-type" = 1; }; "tile-type" = "recents-tile"; }'

You must restart the Dock for this to take effect. Type in the Terminal window:

killall Dock

You should now see a new Dock item with the last-launched application's icon showing on top:

Screenshot of Mac OS X Dock

You can also right-click (Control + mouse click) on your Recent Applications stack to change it to:

  • Recent Documents
  • Recent Servers
  • Favorite Volumes
  • Favorite Items

Screenshot of Mac OS X Dock

About the author(s)

Rachel Baker is an IT Consultant with extensive Windows desktop and server experience and a newcomer to the OSX platform. She loves all things internet, computer hardware, networking, and gadget related. Rachel believes that technology should make your life simpler and not more complicated. She is located in Chicago, IL and is also the co-host of the PC/Mac Smackdown Podcast.

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