MacOS – Remove macOS Dock icon with a command in Terminal

command linedefaultsdockmacosterminal

I'm trying to find the terminal command which can remove an icon from the dock, but I can't find the solution.

I tried the defaults read / defaults write command but it doesn't seem to have the delete function.

The plist is com.apple.dock.

It's curious because the graphical function do it well, and I searched in the console, I don't find what the graphical function call..
I need to do find it to create a removal script..

If someone have a solution, it could be cool.

Thanks

Best Answer

I recommend using dockutil for this. You can either download and install this directly from github, or you can install it using Homebrew with the command

brew install dockutil

Once installed, you can use a command like this to remove an app from the dock

dockutil --remove 'Microsoft Excel'

Related Solutions

MacOS – Is it possible to remove the Dock in Lion

Yes. You can make it so you don't see the dock by adding a very long delay to the animation so that in practice, you never leave the mouse on the "expose the dock" target long enough to see it.

This is technically a "workaround" since the dock is still there, just slower to appear than we care about on our timescale.

Two steps are needed to set this up.

One, activate auto-hide in System Preferences → Dock → Autohide or type ⌘+⌥+D

Two, open the Terminal an type:

defaults write com.apple.dock autohide-time-modifier -int 100; killall Dock

You're set up now. In this example, it takes 100 seconds for the dock to appear. Make the timer even longer if you like, this long delay eventually helps you to forget that the dock is even there.

Reset to default behavior by typing:

defaults delete com.apple.dock autohide-time-modifier; killall Dock

Where do these Terminal commands come from

Well, these commands edit .plist files in your /Users/xyz/Library/Preferences folder. So, if you look at these files, you can look at these files and base your Terminal commands after these.

These are XML-based files, so you can view them in a more readable format if you open them in Xcode, which is available in the Mac App Store.

In the Terminal, the format for these is "defaults write PLIST_FILE KEY -TYPE VALUE" where the PLIST_FILE is the name of the file in the Preferences folder without the .plist, KEY is the key that you can see in Xcode, -TYPE is the type of key that you can find Xcode (and you can find if there is an abbreviation for that type by typing "defaults" into the terminal), and value is the value you wish to set the key at.

Here are some of the string types from the Terminal:

-string <string_value>
-data <hex_digits>
-int[eger] <integer_value>
-float  <floating-point_value>
-bool[ean] (true | false | yes | no)
-date <date_rep>
-array <value1> <value2> ...
-array-add <value1> <value2> ...
-dict <key1> <value1> <key2> <value2> ...
-dict-add <key1> <value1> ...

Best Answer

Related Solutions

MacOS – Is it possible to remove the Dock in Lion

Where do these Terminal commands come from

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