Disable the Dock and Menubar In Specific Applications

Whenever I'm reading my emails or RSS feeds, the dock gets in my way. This is due to several factors, but it's still really irritating. I remembered a while back of a way to disable the dock and menu bar for individual applications. After a bit of googling, this is what I came up with.

Step 1: Figure out if the app you want disable the Dock and Menubar on are Cocoa or Carbon apps. To do this, make the app you want to test have a window open, then switch to Finder. Now, hold down the command key and try dragging the window of the app you are testing. If that application becomes the active application, then it's probably a carbon application. If you can move the window without it becoming active first, it's probably a cocoa application. Here's a short list of cocoa/carbon apps:

Finder: Carbon
Firefox: Carbon
iTunes: Carbon
Adobe Products: Carbon (I haven't tested, but I'm pretty sure all of them are.)
Safari: Cocoa
Mail: Cocoa
TextEdit: Cocoa

If the application is a Cocoa application, then your good to go. Otherwise, you're kinda stuck.


Step 2: Quit the application (Cmd-Q) and go to the application in Finder. You can command-click on it's icon in the dock to quickly open it in Finder.


Step 3: Right click on the application and select "Show Package Contents" from that contextual menu.




Step 4: Navigate to to ./Contents/Info.plist inside the Finder window that pops up.


Step 5: Select the Info.plist file and hit Cmd-D to make a backup of it.




Step 6: Right click on the file, select Open With>Other... and select TextEdit.


Step 7: Now, paste in the following code under the "" line, and above the " Application-Group" line.


<key>LSUIPresentationMode</key>
<integer>3</integer>


It should look like the picture below:



If you want to make it so that the Dock/Menubar are hidden -- but they can be activated by mousing over the appropriate edge of the screen -- change the 3 (bold) from the code above, to a 4.
If you want to get rid of the Dock/Menubar so that they are never visible, then keep the 3.


Step 8: Now, hit Cmd-S to save the file then quit TextEdit with Cmd-Q.


Step 9: Relaunch the application you edited and your changes should be visible.


After you've edited all of your applications, I would suggest doing a repair permissions in Disk Utilities to set the permissions right on all the files you edited.

[Via]