How to make your mac dock show only active apps

At the beginning of this week I told you how to insert spaces in the macOS dock with a simple Terminal command to group the icons of the applications you use and have everything much better organized. Well, this time we are going to highlight another command from the Terminal gracial to which the dock will only show the applications that are currently running. Personally, it is not my preferred option, but perhaps in your case it is just what you were looking for. Let's see.

The dock, only with running apps

In the event that your dock has filled with icons over time, seeing only the active applications at the bottom of your Mac's desktop can be a refreshing change, like when we changed the wallpaper. Also, when you want to launch new applications you can always do it quickly invoking Spotlight with the Command + Space keyboard shortcut.

In order for the macOS dock to only show the applications you are currently using (the ones you have active), you simply have to follow the following steps:

Start the Terminal application that you can find in the "Utilities" section inside the Applications folder.

Once Terminal is open, copy and paste the following command and then press the Enter key on your keyboard to execute it: defaults write com.apple.dock static-only -bool true; killall dock

You will see how the Dock restarts and begins to show only those applications that are currently running on your Mac in the order in which they were launched.

Regretful? How to return the Dock to its original function

If you are finally not convinced by the new behavior of the dock and you want it to operate as usual, all you have to do is:

Start the Terminal application again.

Copy and paste the following command, and then press the Enter key on your keyboard to execute it: defaults write com.apple.dock static-only -bool false; killall dock

The Dock will restart and show all the applications that you had there, both those that are running and those that are not.