How to Disable the Useless Dashboard on Mac OS X

After getting my new MacBook Air with the awesome battery life, I decided to give OS X a spin for a while to see how I liked it. About 34 seconds later, I encountered my first irritation: The stupid Dashboard feature is just completely useless. Here’s how to disable it.

Note: overall, Mac OS X is a really great operating system. It’s just this one feature that makes no sense.

Simply Remove Dashboard from Spaces

One of the first things I noticed when using a new Mac is that the Dashboard is always there when you hit the F3 key to show Mission Control, and always seemed to be in the way. You can simply remove it from Mission Control so it isn’t always in your face. That way you can continue to use the Dashboard if you like it, but it won’t be annoying you all the time.

To do that, just open System Preferences -> Mission Control, and un-check the option for “Show Dashboard as a Space”.

Of course, this doesn’t disable the dashboard, it just makes it a lot less noticeable.

Disable the Dashbaord

Thankfully, it’s really easy to disable the Dashboard — open up a Terminal and paste this in:

defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean YES && killall Dock

To reverse it and re-enable it, use this:

defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean NO && killall Dock

Yep. It’s simple.