Useful Terminal Commands for Dashboard
The Mac Dashboard. Whether you love it or hate it, it can’t be argued that it uses up what can be some valuable system resources. On older machines it can actually slow them down considerably. My PowerBook G4 is two years old and if I open Dashboard, I really notice a difference.
In my search for a way to get rid of Dashboard (or temporarily disable it) I found a number of little applications that will do this for you. The problem there is that you have to have the application - which wastes hard-drive space. Instead, if you’re not afraid of the terminal, try some of these useful commands:
To turn the Dashboard off:
defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean YES
To turn the Dashboard on:
defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean NO
After entering one of the above commands, you need to restart the Dock to allow the changes to take effect:
killall Dock
Now you don’t have to have any of those applications lying around and you don’t have to worry about Dashboard eating up system resources! I like to kill Dashboard just before playing any RAM-intensive games, just to make sure it’ll run at its best.
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I’ve also come across a nice little feature of Dashboard; developer mode. This allows you to pull your widgets off the Dashboard and have them sitting above your applications instead.
To turn on Dashboard developer mode:
defaults write com.apple.dashboard devmode YES
Turn off Dashboard developer mode:
defaults write com.apple.dashboard devmode NO
Once again, after entering one of the above commands, you need to restart the Dock:
killall Dock
With developer mode enabled, simply click and hold on one of the widgets and press F12. The widget will be dragged off the Dashboard and can be placed anywhere you want above your Desktop and applications. This is fairly useful for when you want quick access to a widget repeatedly, so you don’t have to go into Dashboard and have all those other widgets loading and doing what they do.
I personally use developer mode when I’m coding in Java. The JavaDoc widget is so useful, I just place it next to my Dock, which gives me quick and easy access to any of the documentation.
