On a Mac, the Dock is the one utility that keeps us tied to our favorite applications. It keeps everything nice and neat, but did you know you can customize certain properties on your dock to make it more to your liking?

To start with, you’ll need to open the Terminal application (located in Applications/Utilities, or just type Terminal into Spotlight). Just type in the following commands and press enter to execute them. Once you’ve typed in your commands and tweaks, you need to restart the Dock for them to take effect. To restart the Dock, type the following command into Terminal:

killall Dock

To disable the tweak, just run the “Reversal Command” for that code.

1. Enable the Suck Minimize Effect

When you first turn on your Mac, you can choose from the default “Genie” minimize animation or change it to the simp “Scale” animation. There’s actually a hidden effect called “Suck.” To enable it, type in the command:

defaults write com.apple.dock mineffect suck

If you think Suck sucks, just change it back in System Preferences > Dock.

2. Enable iTunes Track Notifications

There are a ton of third party applications that put iTunes track notifications in the menubar, but you can have similar functionality in the dock by entering the following command in Terminal.

defaults write com.apple.dock itunes-notifications -bool TRUE

Now the iTunes icon will have a little bubble showing the artist and song title at a song change. If you start getting annoyed, just type in the same code and change true to FALSE.

3. Make List View Stacks like Grid View Stacks

Stacks are the nifty little fold icons that hangout near the trash icon in your dock. By default, the List view can look a little bland. The following command can zazz it up a little bit.

defaults write com.apple.dock use-new-list-stack -bool YES

To change it, just change yes to NO.

4. Line Up the Dock

The standard Dock preferences allow you to put it on the bottom of the screen, the left and right sides, but nothing else. You can position the Dock to your liking with the following commands in Terminal.

Pin the Dock to the Right:

defaults write com.apple.dock pinning -string "start"

Pin the Dock to the Left:

defaults write com.apple.dock pinning -string "end"

Pin the Dock to the default position (center):

defaults write com.apple.dock pinning -string "middle"

Personally, I have my dock on the left of my screen at the start since the menubar file system is always at the top left of the screen. But that’s my reasoning. Hopefully, with these Terminal commands you’ll be able to mix things up to your liking, and maybe wow your friends with your cool Terminal skills.

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