• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Mark Ratledge .com

writer and wordpress consultant in montana

  • Home
  • About
  • Articles & Columns
    • Points in Case
    • Slackjaw
    • McSweeney’s
    • Medium
    • Random Tech
    • The Buffalo Post
    • Words on WordPress
    • Rocks and Bones
    • Mac Q & A on Macs and macOS
    • State of the Arts Tech Talk
  • WordPress
  • Contact
You are here: Home / Mac Q & A on Macs and macOS / Mac Q & A: How Do I Get Rid of Programs in the Dock?

Mac Q & A: How Do I Get Rid of Programs in the Dock?

January 16, 2011 by Mark Ratledge

My Mac Q & A Question: How do I get rid of all the program icons I don’t use in the Dock? I never use them and they make the Dock wide. A.G., Missoula

If the program is open, the icon will appear in the dock when it’s running and disappear when you quit it. But if it’s a icon for iCal, iPhoto, Garageband or one of the Apple installed programs that you never use, it’s easy to remove.

Click and hold down the mouse and drag the icon out of the dock to the desktop. You’ll see it disappear in a puff of smoke.

Removing the icon from the Dock doesn’t delete the program, which is good, in case you want to use it in the future. If you want to put the program back in the Dock, find the program in your Applications folder and drag the icon back to the Dock.

To remove an icon on a MacBook with a trackpad, hold down the Option key and click once on the icon to bring up a menu that will give you options to remove the icon.

You can see this same menu with the mouse on a desktop Mac by right clicking or holding down the Option key and clicking. The contextual menu shows other options like Start, Remove from Dock, Open at Login and Show in FInder. And when the program is running, you can elect to Keep in Dock, which means the icon will stay in the Dock when the program isn’t running, so you can easily start it up again.

The Dock itself has options, too. Right click or option click on the row of bars near the Trash can and you will see options for the Dock, including size, magnification, position on screen, etc.


Related Posts:
  • Mac Q & A: Working with the OS X Dock
  • Mac Q & A: Pasting Plain Text
  • Mac Q & A: Right Clicking with a MacBook
  • Wading Through New Mac App Store
  • Mac Q & A: Add a CD-DVD Eject button in the Menu Bar

Primary Sidebar

Stack Exchange
profile for markratledge on Stack Exchange, a network of free, community-driven Q&A sites
I'm a "Top Rated" consultant on Upwork

Copyright © 2022 · Mark Ratledge Privacy and Terms of Use