Dock Lock

[sorahn]

Heya, i'm looking for an app that will lock the status of the dock from drag and drop. I find that on my laptop i'm always accidentally dragging an app out of the dock and dropping it somewhere on the screen making it poof.

If anyone can point me in the right direction, that would be awesome.

Thanks!

[melon]

TransparentDock can do it (amongst other options), however the program isn't free.

[acme.mail.order]

Tried the low-tech solution of just locking the com.apple.dock.plist file?

[sorahn]

hmm, never thought of that.

So, doing it that way i'm still able to edit it, but if i kill / relaunch it, it returns to what it was.

Cool! thanks!

[melon]

Quote: Originally Posted by acme.mail.order Tried the low-tech solution of just locking the com.apple.dock.plist file?

I've not personally tried, but it seems that won't work according to this post: http://forums.macosxhints.com/showthread.php?t=5474

In a non-admin account you can lock the Dock in System Preferences > Accounts > Parental controls, though this may be quite bothersome. OS X Server can do this for all accounts apparently but then you need to own it.

Edit:- This may work:

Quote: The "Dock" can be locked to prevent the accidental removal of items as you described. Try opening "/Applications" > "Utilities" > "Terminal.app" and entering these two commands: defaults write com.apple.dock contents-immutable -bool true osascript -e 'tell application "Dock" to quit' To unlock it again, just repeat the commands, using "false" instead of true. I don't have "Tiger" so I don't know where things stand now, but in early versions of "Tiger", there was a bug so that it was possible to intentionally bypass this setting using the "Remove from Dock" contextual menu item - so this method would no longer work (as it does in "Panther") to prevent tampering with the "Dock" . But for preventing accidental drags, it should be fine.

You could probably create an AppleScript/Automator Action to toggle the option on/off (something similar to this), but I don't know how.

[melon]

I've had a quick go at AppleScripting, this seems to work:

display dialog "Lock the Dock..." buttons {"Lock", "Unlock", "Cancel"} default button 3
copy the result as list to {buttonpressed}
if the buttonpressed is "Lock" then
	try
		tell application "Dock" to quit
		do shell script "defaults write com.apple.dock contents-immutable -bool true"
		delay 1
		tell application "Dock" to activate
	end try
else if the buttonpressed is "Unlock" then
	try
		tell application "Dock" to quit
		do shell script "defaults write com.apple.dock contents-immutable -bool false"
		delay 1
		tell application "Dock" to activate
	end try
end if

Put that into Script Editor and save it as an application.

The code was based on this hint and there are loads of variations. It can probably be made better considering I know very little AppleScript

I have found an easy program that will lock the dock for you. It is called Deeper and if you go into the "Dock" tab you can check "Lock the icons".
In order to get Deeper you can visit: