Yesss! What’s not up, Dock? Heh heh…easier than I thought…
To go Dockless in OS X, you need the following functions accomplished by other means:
€ An application launcher. There are already myriads of launchers available for Mac OS X, and the Dock makes a miserable launcher anyhow. I use the above-mentioned X-Assist (available at VersionTracker) and I use an alias to my OtherMenu folder from Mac OS 9 as my X-Assist Items folder, so I have the identical menu of applications in both operating systems. Other people prefer something that looks and feels more like Apple’s classical Launcher. A popular choice is Drop Drawers. (No accounting for taste. I don’t want anything cluttering up my screen when not in use). A popular choice is Drop Drawers.
€ An application switcher. A means of switching between open applications and seeing at a glance what applications are running. Again, there are many choices and, again, I’m using X-Assist for that as well. X-Assist is amost exactly like the classical Applications menu except that it contains a user-configurable launching menu within it, so it accomplishes both tasks to my distinct satisfaction.
€ Access to the trash. Yeah, the bloody trash resides by default in the Dock. Well, you can put anything INTO the trash with a simple Command-Delete keystroke, whether you can see it or not. Or, if you prefer the thrill of dragging something onto the Trash icon, the freeware item TinkerTool (once again available at VersionTracker) lets you put the Trash on the Desktop where it belongs. Unfortunately, the Trash-on-the-Desktop doesn’t OPEN when you double-click it; only the Trash-in-the-Dock will open properly on request. And if you can’t open it, you can’t pull something OUT of it if you change your mind, see? So what you do is, you make a folder and give it a distinctive name like “This is X Trash, dummy” and drag it into the trash, then you reboot in Mac OS 9 (or 8 or 7 or whatever, any Mac OS you use that ain’t X). Do a find in Sherlock (or Find File if you are using elderly Mac software) for the distinctively named folder you trashed, and you’ll find that it is located in an invisible folder named “.Trash” (notice the period). Use any of the many available tools that let you change a folder’s characteristics from invisible to visible. (I used DeskZap, a System 6 era Disk Accessory believe it or not.) Make “.Trash” visible. Go to the surrounding folder (it bears your logon name and resides in the Users folder) and make an alias to the now-visible folder “.Trash”. Name the alias “Trash”. Put it somewhere you can find easily when you reboot into X. Reboot into X. Place alias you created on your Mac OS X desktop. If you have trash in the trash can, you can double-click the Trash alias and it opens. To throw away the first item, you’ll need to use Command-Delete, but if the trash is occupied by at least one item, you can drag things into the Trash alias as well.
€ Nuking the Dock. Boot into Mac OS 9 (or 8, etc). Double-click the Mac OS X bootup volume and drill your way down to System/Library/Core Services and there you will find a folder named Dock.app (Mac OS X “Cocoa” applications may look like folders under classical pre-X versions of Mac OS) or else an application named Dock (Mac OS 9.1 only and depending on your settings). Either way, drag it out of Core Services and put it somewhere in case you ever want it back. Reboot into Mac OS X. No dock!