How to open application’s windows on dock separately like Windows 7

dock

I'm new to OS X.

If I open multiple Excel workbooks, how can I see each workbook opened separately on the dock?

Any help?

Best Answer

Native methods closest to what you want are:

Right clicking Dock icon, as mentioned by @JBallin
- That will show a context list, which will include the titles of the open windows for that application
There's also the mission control feature that will show all open windows for the currently active application. You can find the shortcut in: System Preferences > Mission Control and there Application windows. I'm fairly sure you can set touch gestures for this as well. You should find that in System Preferences > Trackpad

If the native methods don't work for you, there's always the option to use third party applications.

There's a 3rd party Dock replacement called uBar ($20). There's a trial available.

You can stop some applications from showing up in the dock, which is not very doable off the box with the native Dock.
Has window previews and option to group application windows (kinda like in Windows).
Ordering options: Manual, Alphabetical, Launch _{^{I love the manual order. I can make sure that when I open adobe applications, for example, they always open next to each other at the top of my uBar.}}
You'll likely want to hide native Dock. You can find terminal commands for that in here. It just hides it so that you are never likely to accidentally show it. You need the second to last terminal command. You can still easily toggle the native Dock open via the shortcut Cmd+Alt+D. The reason why I occasionally have the need to show the native dock is to assign which space I want an application to go to, which you do by right-clicking an icon in the dock and choosing: Options > Assing To:(at the bottom of the list). This is not a feature in uBar, so...

Note that uBar has quite a few customization options, but I'd say it has two distinct styles. First style is very Windows Taskbar like, as shown in that picture above. The second style is closer to the modern Dock look:

Another alternative or addition could be HyperSwitch (free beta). ^{_{I use both of these 3rd party applications.}}

It has option to show previews of windows when using cmd+tab
- It works by either cmd+tab:ing or hovering over the icon with a mouse. You can choose which window to open by navigating with arrow keys or of course clicking with mouse.
It also has it's own alternative application switcher which can show each application window, instead the application icon, which is more like the windows application switcher. It can also be made to show only application windows in the current space, which is super useful for people who use spaces a lot.

Related Solutions

Dock Icons behaving like they’d be locked, but they are not

Have you tried deleting the Dock prefs?

MacOS – How to make clicking on icon in dock == open new instance

You can kludge something together with some AppleScript and some clever icon image pasting. Here's how you'd do it for iTerm/iTerm2.

Open the AppleScript Editor and paste in the following AppleScript:

set myapp to "iTerm"
on appIsRunning(appName)
    tell application "System Events" to (name of processes) contains appName
end appIsRunning
if appIsRunning(myapp) then
    # What you do here will depend on the program. This works for
    # iTerm but you'll need to look up the actions for other programs
    # since this bit is iTerm-specific.
    tell application "iTerm"
        set myterm to (make new terminal)
        tell myterm
            launch session "Default"
        end tell
    end tell
else
    tell application myapp
        activate
    end tell
end if

You can use the Run button in the editor to test that it works. If you want a different profile opened change "Default" on line 12 to the name of the profile you want opened.

Now save this AppleScript. In the Save dialog under "File Format" at the bottom select "Application" from the list.

I saved mine as "New iTerm.app" to my Desktop.

Now every time I click on "New iTerm.app" on my Desktop I get a new iTerm window. I can drag "New iTerm.app" to my Dock and it'll be a Dock icon I can click on any time I want to get a new iTerm window open. But the icon is the generic AppleScript icon.

Let's change it to the iTerm icon. Select "New iTerm.app" on the Desktop and click Cmd-I to bring up the properties screen for the application.

Now navigate to /Applications in a Finder window, find iTerm in the list of installed applications, select it and click Cmd-I to open the properties screen for the iTerm application.

Click the icon in the iTerm info window so it gets a soft blue shadow around it. Press Cmd-C to copy the icon to the clipboard.

Now click the icon in the "New iTerm.app" info window and press Cmd-V to paste the iTerm icon on to the "New iTerm.app" application.

Copying the icon from iTerm to New iTerm

It should now have an iTerm icon.

You can move the "New iTerm.app" to your /Applications folder if you like. Drag it from the folder you decide to keep it in, back to your dock, and you can now click on it in the Dock to open up a new iTerm window with every click.

If you wanted to be able to distinguish it from the running iTerm.app Dock icon you could consider pasting the icon in to an image editor like Pixelmator and adding a big red + to it so it's clearly identified as the icon to press for a new iTerm window instead of the icon to press to see the exiting, open iTerm application.

Here are some more scripts for some other applications to get you started customizing things:

Google Chrome (New Window)

set myapp to "Google Chrome"
on appIsRunning(appName)
    tell application "System Events" to (name of processes) contains appName
end appIsRunning
if appIsRunning(myapp) then
    tell application "Google Chrome"
        make new window
    end tell
else
    tell application myapp
        activate
    end tell
end if

Google Chrome (New Tab)

set myapp to "Google Chrome"
on appIsRunning(appName)
    tell application "System Events" to (name of processes) contains appName
end appIsRunning
if appIsRunning(myapp) then
    tell application "Google Chrome"
        make new tab at end of tabs of window 1
    end tell
else
    tell application myapp
        activate
    end tell
end if

Sublime Text 2

Unfortunately ST2 doesn't seem to have an AppleScript accessible extensions. You can always take a look at the OS X command line tool that ST2 ships with. You can call that from a simple script in the Dock to open a new window in ST2. So:

set myapp to "Sublime Text 2"
on appIsRunning(appName)
    tell application "System Events" to (name of processes) contains appName
end appIsRunning
if appIsRunning(myapp) then
    # Assumes you've installed the subl command line tool for ST2
    # in to /usr/local/bin. Adjust accordingly.
    do shell script "/usr/local/bin/subl --new-window"
else
    tell application myapp
        activate
    end tell
end if