For example, once you click the Dictionary widget, you're ready to type a word in its search field. You can move these widgets anywhere you want by simply dragging them with your pointer. Once you're in Dashboard, you should see some widgets appear, such as the World Clock or Calculator. Choose the Dashboard space to switch to it.
OS X includes widgets for some of your favorite Mac apps, like Contacts and Calendar.
This is less important for modern versions of OS X, but earlier versions of Mac OS can benefit greatly from limiting the amount of Dashboard widgets that are loaded or live.Dashboard provides you with a quick overview of info you use daily-like your local weather, quick notes, a calculator, and more.ĭashboard provides access to several fun and functional, mini applications called widgets.
If you don’t want to disable Dashboard completely, but want to regain some of the lost memory that is being hogged by open Widgets, check out this article to Free up System Memory by killing Dashboard widgets. That’s all there is to it! Summon the Dashboard widgets as usual and you’ll be back to normal, good as new. Re-Enabling Dashboardĭecided you want to turn Dashboard back on again? No big deal, you can type or paste the following exactly into the Terminal window:ĭefaults write mcx-disabled -boolean NOĪgain, kill the Dock, which will reload the now activated Dashboard:
Dashboard is completely unloaded from OS X and will no longer be a part of the Mac experience.īut what if you had a change of heart and want Dashboard and your favorite widgets for conversions, weather, dictionary, web pages, sports scores, stocks, all that helpful stuff that you can get access to at the tap of a key? Getting Dashboard back in action is just as simple as turning it off, so fear not and regain the feature again. Hit F12 or swipe around in Mission Control or Spaces, and nothing will happen. That’s it, now Dashboard is completely disabled. Next, kill the currently running Dashboard by killing the Dock (the Dock will reload itself, don’t worry):
Type or paste the following exactly into the Terminal window:ĭefaults write mcx-disabled -boolean YES If you are comfortable with Terminal, follow these simple steps to completely turn off the widgets and Dashboard feature: Turning Off Dashboard If you are not comforatble with the command line, it’s best to leave this alone. Turning Dashboard off and on is done easily through the Terminal, so your first step is to launch the Terminal app which is found in the /Applications/Utilities/ folder.
This defaults trick works in all versions of OS X that have Dashboard, including Leopard, Snow Leopard, Lion, Mountain Lion, and Mavericks.
But of course users can choose to go further, and this is relevant to all versions of OS X, so for those that don’t use Dashboard or its widget features at all, we’ll show you how to disable Dashboard completely (but don’t worry, it is just as easy to enable again should you change your mind).ĭisabling Dashboard in Mac OS X Completely As regular readers may recall, we have discussed how unused Dashboard widgets can take up a lot of memory and slow your systems performance on older Macs running versions of OS X prior to more modern releases with better memory management (think Leopard, not Mavericks), and we also showed you how to reclaim that memory by terminating the individual processes. How much use you get out of Dashboard will probably determine if you want the feature to stick around in Mac OS X or not. Dashboard is the kind of thing you either love or hate, using the widgets constantly or not at all.