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Dock

Add some System Preferences icons to the Dock

If you have certain System Preferences panels that you access a lot, and you're a Dock person (as opposed to a ⌘-Space and type person), here's a little timesaver: You can add any System Preferences panel directly to your Dock. You can't add it to the left side, as the individual panels aren't applications. But they are documents, so you can add them to the right side of the dock—just drag and drop from Finder.

You'll find the System-provided panels in /System/Library/PreferencePanes; third-party panels may appear in either your user's Library/PreferencePanes folder, or the top-level /Library/PreferencePanes folder. Find the one(s) you'd like in your Dock, then just drag and drop.

You can, of course, keep System Preferences itself in your Dock, and then right-click to see a list of all preference panels. For those panels you access often, though, this method is much quicker.



Make your macOS Dock suck

Now, some may not like the Dock and say it already sucks. But I'm actually referring to a really old hint that ran on Mac OS X 10.0's release date—March 24, 2001.

The hint explained that the Dock has three minimization modes available; back then, you had no choice of which to use. Now we have a choice between two: Genie (the default) and Scale, selectable on the Dock System Preferences panel. If you'd like to see the hidden third mode, Suck, issue these two commands in Terminal:

defaults write com.apple.Dock mineffect suck
killall Dock

Your Dock will restart, and when you minimize a window, it will be sucked into the Dock. The best way to compare these three animations is by watching them in slow motion—hold down Shift1That's called a hidden hint—hold Shift to see any macOS animation in slow motion. while clicking the yellow button on any window. Or just watch this video…

I personally use Scale, though I am surprised that Suck has survived intact over all the intervening years.