This is a new segment of tips I’ll publish each Tuesday that only take a minute to read and implement. Kudos to one of my favorite websites, The Sweet Setup for their quick tips and inspiration for these posts.
The Mac Dashboard (the screen to the left of all your other screens and has widgets you can add to it) has become a ghost town. I’ve almost seen a tumbleweed roll across mine. Since I have an affinity for getting rid of stuff I don’t need, I dug into how to nix the Dashboard.
It’s fairly simple, and you can do it too! My thanks to HowToGeek for this info.
- Open Terminal on your Mac
- Copy this code
defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean YES && killall Dock
- Paste that code into Terminal and press enter
- Say, “Hasta la vista, Dashboard!”
If you want to bring back that wretched space, just copy and paste this code into Terminal and crunch enter
defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean NO && killall Dock
Dashboard–boom, roasted.
One last tip–if you are using a text expansion tool (which I highly recommend), I use the short cut xdashoff to save the script above that kills the Dashboard. I use xdashon as the shortcut for script that turns the Dashboard back on, making it very easy to turn it off and on as you please.
If you want to see a screencast of me turning the dashboard off and on, you can check it out here.