How to highlight items in the OS X Dock Stacks Grid view

January 17, 2021 / By

This very brief tutorial will show you how to enable a useful feature in Grid view of Dock item stacks. Why it’s disabled by default is beyond me, as it’s actually quite useful.

Please note: in newer versions of macOS (macOS 10.14 “Mojave” and later) this featured is enabled by default. If you’re using an older version of macOS (10.13 High Sierra and earlier) the instructions are still accurate and will work exactly as described.

  1. As you can see from the image below, item/folder names are truncated in Grid view, making it (sometimes) difficult to determine which file/folder is which.


    2. click to enlarge

  2. Start by opening a terminal and pasting in the following line:

    defaults write com.apple.dock mouse-over-hlite-stack -boolean YES

    and then enter:

    killall Dock


    3. click to enlarge

  3. Now when you open a Grid stack, and mouse-over an item with a truncated name, the full thing will be displayed.


    4. click to enlarge

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