FreshMacApps Tutorials For Terminal

A Few UI Tricks with  your Terminal

Welcome back to FreshMacApps Tutorials. Today we will be covering Terminal and I will be showing you a few tricks to change up your system preferences in a way that customizes your Mac to your liking. By the end of this tutorial you should be able to: disable the warning when changing a file extension and make dock icons for hidden applications appear translucent.

Changing File Extensions without Warning Dialog

First thing we will touch on is how to disable the warning dialog so that when you change a file extension on any file, say like changing a png file to a jpg, the computer inputs the change without any feedback. So open your Terminal app and input the following into your console:

defaults write com.apple.dock showhidden

#split into two lines

#the line below the comments should be

#on the same line as the top command

 -bool true
 killall Dock

If you change any files now you should not see the warning popup from the system. Give it a shot, if you do get a warning then something went wrong.

Change Dock Icons To Appear Translucent When Hidden

Next we will change your Dock interface settings so that when you hide an application, the dock icon now become transparent. This is an interest effect and a useful reminder of which applications you still have running if you need one. Go back to Terminal and enter the following into your console:

defaults write com.apple.dock showhidden -bool true

killall Dock

 Your Dock should restart itself and the changes should be apparent or at the very least transparent. Give it a try, hide one of the applications in your Dock. If you don’t see the icon for the application becoming translucent then there has been some sort of hangup and you need to go back and fix something. Anyway that will be the end for this lesson, check out our other tutorials to learn more.

Last updated by FreshMacApps at January 25, 2013.