How to Dim Hidden Apps in the Mac Dock (Terminal Trick)

Press Cmd+H and the current app vanishes — no minimize animation, no Dock pileup, just gone until you call it back. The one flaw: the Dock gives no clue which apps are hidden and which simply have no windows. A hidden preference fixes that by rendering hidden apps translucent in the Dock. One command, fully reversible, and it works on Ventura, Sonoma, and Sequoia.

Turn on dimming

Open Terminal (Applications → Utilities) and run:

# show hidden apps as translucent Dock icons
defaults write com.apple.dock showhidden -bool true
killall Dock

The Dock restarts in about a second. Now hide any app — click it and press Cmd+H — and watch its Dock icon fade to a ghosted, translucent version of itself. Unhide the app (click its icon or Cmd+Tab to it) and the icon returns to full strength.

Turn it off

# back to uniform Dock icons
defaults delete com.apple.dock showhidden
killall Dock

There's no System Settings switch for this one — it lives only in the com.apple.dock preference domain, so Terminal (or a tool that wraps it) is the only way on and off.

Hidden vs minimized: why this matters

macOS has two ways to get a window out of your face, and they look confusingly similar in the Dock:

• Minimized (Cmd+M, yellow button): the window shrinks into the right side of the Dock as its own thumbnail. Visible, but cluttering.
• Hidden (Cmd+H): the whole app — every window — disappears with no trace in the Dock beyond the little “running” indicator dot.

Hiding is the cleaner habit, but its invisibility is the cost: ten minutes later you can't tell whether Safari is hidden with twelve windows or just sitting there windowless. The showhidden tweak restores the missing feedback — ghosted icon means “hidden, will restore everything on click.” It's the visual you didn't know the Dock was withholding.

The workflow it unlocks

With dimming on, a hide-first workflow becomes genuinely pleasant:

• Cmd+H anything you're done with for now — the app parks itself, dimmed, in the Dock.
• Option+Cmd+H hides everything except the current app — instant focus, and the Dock shows exactly what got swept aside.
• Option+click a Dock icon to switch to it while hiding the app you're leaving — the Dock dims one icon as it brightens another.

Your Dock becomes an honest status board: bright icons are in play, dimmed icons are parked, dotted-but-bright icons are running with no windows. No third-party window manager needed.

If nothing looks different

Two things to check. First, make sure the app is hidden, not minimized — minimized windows don't dim their app's icon. Second, confirm the value stuck:

# should print 1
defaults read com.apple.dock showhidden

If it prints 1 and icons still don't dim, run killall Dock again — the Dock only reads preferences at launch.

A ten-second test drive

Right after enabling, prove it to yourself:

1. Open Safari and TextEdit so both are running with windows.
2. Click Safari, press Cmd+H — Safari's Dock icon fades to translucent.
3. Press Option+Cmd+H in TextEdit — everything else dims at once.
4. Click any dimmed icon — the app returns, windows intact, icon back at full opacity.

Notice what didn't dim: apps that are merely in the background stay solid, and minimized-window thumbnails on the right of the Dock are unaffected. The translucency means one thing only — this app was hidden with Cmd+H — which is exactly the signal that was missing. Like all Dock tweaks, the setting is per-user and survives restarts and macOS updates until you delete it.

Pairs perfectly with single-app mode

If you like the hide-everything workflow, the Dock can enforce it: single app mode hides every other app on each Dock click — and with dimming on, you can see it happen.