In my search for the ability to hide an app’s dock icon, I ran across a little application called Dockless, which removes the application’s dock icon even when its running. The program is amazingly simple: it surveys all of the applications on your Mac and then gives you the option of having a dock icon for it while its running or not. You can just as easily restore the dock icon for an application as you hid it.
There is one downside to this approach (which as far as I know is the only approach to this problem). When you hide the dock icon for an application, you will no longer be able to control it if you close its window. Since you’d use Dockless on the kind of applications you want to hide tend to be those that should run in the background without much intervention anyway, this isn’t much as problem.
However, I have found that that problem is easily remedied by two different solutions
- You can bring up the program’s main window by relaunching the program (a quick keystroke in Quicksilver or from Finder), which will bring up the program’s window again.
- You can get to the program’s preferences by remembering the keyboard shortcut for preferences on a Mac (typically ? + ,)
- Worse comes to worst, you can always rerun Dockless and re-enable the app’s dock icon. Configure what you need, and then hide the icon again with Dockless.
So there you have it – a simple app that provides a simple solution for an annoying problem – be sure and check out Dockless!