Viewing Folders as Stacks in the Dock

Markus wrote in to ask how he can view his folders as fanned stacks in the Dock, which is one of the visual features Apple touted when Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard was released. Fortunately, that’s an easier question to answer now: when 10.5 was first released, the user had no control over this functionality. If you had just a few items in a folder, it would “fan out” when you clicked on it, and if you had many items, you could only view them in a grid. Now, you can choose how to view your folders in the Dock.

For those of you who have never put a folder in your dock, take a look at the image below. You can see a striped dividing line to the left of the folder I have highlighted. Everything to the left of that line is an application; everything to the right of the line can be a folder or file. Personally, I keep my Documents folder and my Downloads folder on the Dock for easy access.

If you click once on a folder, a number of items from the folder will appear, either as a list, grid, or fan view. If you right-click (or hold down the control key and click) on the folder, you will have the option of changing these settings:

Just like any other view in the Finder, you can change how your items are displayed from the Dock. Changing the selection under “View content as” will allow you (and Markus) to view the items as a fan or another view. You can experiment with all of these settings to give you the most efficient way to view your folder items. You might even try the List view, which allows you to traverse nested folders right from the Dock!

Did this tip work for you? How else do you like to view your items in the Dock? Let others know in the comments.

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Tagged as: Dock