Feb 17
I found this handy little trick on macosxhints.com. Most people use Exposé quite frequently, I know I do. I have one of my hot corners set to “show desktop” which I like to do if I want to make sure something has downloaded correctly. However, all of my windows get shoved off the screen and there’s that annoying black border. So when I found this terminal command, I was delighted.
Open terminal and type in:
defaults write com.apple.dock wvous-olddesktop -bool false
Then, restart the dock by typingkillall DockThis way, when you “show desktop” (default F11) all of your windows combine into a little window on your desktop.
February 17th, 2008 at 8:05 am
You forgot to mention that the reason this method isn’t officially supported is that it’s extremely buggy. If you try this, expect your mac to crash or being unable to retrieve your windows again from the little box. Just thought I’d warn you.
February 17th, 2008 at 9:01 am
“crash”
February 17th, 2008 at 9:02 am
macs are great for adult websites
February 17th, 2008 at 11:01 am
so i get that this make your computer crash, how do i turn it back to regular?
please respond
February 17th, 2008 at 11:46 am
@Chet,
defaults write com.apple.dock wvous-olddesktop -bool true
February 17th, 2008 at 12:05 pm
Sorry i forgot to say… there is a tendancy to crash, I find mostly when you move around the little window. If you want to reset it, change false to true.
February 17th, 2008 at 3:11 pm
I, personally, did not experience a crash but I never tried to move the little window around either. What I did notice is that after pressing my hot key for show desktop the little window worked fine but the black border showed up and never went away. Needless to say, back to true.
February 20th, 2008 at 10:31 am
Hey i changed false to true, and typed killall dock this way…
still cant get it back to default.
any ideas?
February 20th, 2008 at 11:39 am
I too cannot get this to go away now
February 20th, 2008 at 8:45 pm
I’m sorry, I tried setting mine back and I didn’t have any problems. Make sure you have the line completely correct, otherwise just copy and paste. What does the terminal read after entering in the line with true? Let me know if you still can’t figure it out.
February 21st, 2008 at 4:31 am
THANK YOU SOOOOOOOOOOOOO MUCH wdympcf, I LOVE YOU!!!
February 29th, 2008 at 12:31 pm
dhruv,
dock needs to be capitalized
killall Dock
October 23rd, 2008 at 4:29 am
how do you make it normal again?
October 23rd, 2008 at 4:32 am
nevermind, i forgot to restart the dock.
oops.
March 14th, 2009 at 10:00 pm
I’ve use this tweak for a couple of months, i really like the way it shows my desktop without the black border on the top. I can say that I havent had a crash on my leopard not even once, maybe its beucase i dont move the little screen around since for me it’s in the correct place.
March 14th, 2009 at 10:01 pm
any other nice tricks ?