Disable Dashboard in Mac OSX Lion, Snow Leopard, Leopard, and Tiger

Now you might be thinking why would I want to Disable Dashboard in Mac OSX?

Well heres a bit of history… When Apple released Mac OS 10.4 (Tiger) one of the bold new features that it had rolled into it was the “Dashboard”, a quick and easy to access part of OS X that could quickly give you access to a calculator, or help you know what the weather is, or even play a fun little game. The possibilities were virtually endless, and there were lots of available developers to create Dashboard “Widgets” since the widgets were essentially just HTML and Javascript bundles that were parsed by the Dashboard engine. So almost overnight you had widgets that could wash your dishes and walk your dog, and just about anything else you could dream of, but there was a downside to all this fun simple single use widget mania… Resource Hoarding!

These simple little widgets would wait in the background for the moment when they could satisfy your whims, but the cost for that was lost productivity as Ram and CPU time were being “minimally” eaten up by these seemingly harmless widgets.

After dealing with these issues for far to long I finally decided that I had to find a way to rid myself of these little bundles of “UnJoy” and Disable Dashboard. After a long hard search I finally found the answer that works on Mac OS 10.4 (Tiger), 10.5 (Leopard), 10.6 (Snow Leopard) and 10.7 (Lion). It’s not all that difficult really, just a few simple commands and you will Disable Dashboard so you will never have to deal with it again… unless you want to.

Enough with the History lets Disable Dashboard

So to Disable Dashboard open up your Terminal application in the Applications -> Utilities folder and run the following commands:

  • defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean YES
  • killall Dock
This will Disable Dashboard (And there was much rejoicing!)
But if you decide that you want to see those annoying little bundles of pain again simply run the following commands in your terminal to get them back:
  • defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean NO
  • killall Dock
Now you are back to normal.