The issue of Leopards confusing, or untidy stacks has been a questions thats ranged for some time, as I pointed out over on Andy Pipers blog; The stack itself is just a mishmash of all the icons in that folder pile don top of each other, meaning that sometimes they got a bit confusing by either looking all the same (you’d have an application icon in the download and say the application stack, or it just wasn’t clear from a first look what was what.
I mentioned on Andy’s blog about trying to trick finder into showing the last icon at the front, and I’d played a bit with using touch from terminal to fix a date in the future to bring the icon to the front. However I found a great post on XD’s Blog that discusses a japanese post about tidying them up.
The basics are, you place semi-transparent icons into the folder that you’re putting onto the dock as a stack, in my case I have Documents, Applications, and Downloads
The resulting new and improved stacks on my system now look like this;
The actual physicals of how to do this are fairly simple and for the smart amongst you.. involved terminal, touch, and a bit of cut and paste..
Get the zip archive of the icons from optica optima here unzip them to someplace (thanks martin, I’ve linked to the other site that seems now to have a number of different styles), you’ll find it contains about 20 odd icons for folders like applications, accounts, downloads etc, each icon attached to a directory. Copy the correct directory into the other directory that you want to use in your dock stack.For instance if I was going to update my downloads stack, I’d copy the Downloads folder from the zipfile into my download folder in my user account.We now need to fire up Terminal and do a bit of touching here and there.. You’ll need to replace the ” Downloads “ name in the below for each of the folders you want correctly stackable in your dock, keeping in mind that the directories in the zipfile have a leading and trailing space on their name.
cd ~/Downloads
touch -mt 202001010101.01 ” Downloads “
This will change the date modified of the icon to 1st January, 2020. Now just make sure your stack is sorting by date modified (ctrl-click or right-click the stack and Sort by..) Repeat for other stacks you have and there you go, a nice and elegant solution to the stack icon issue.
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