When I installed Namely (a simple application launcher), I decided to find the way of solving something that, despite not being a problem, it has always been annoying (at least for me).

I’m talking about all those running applications that most of the times we don’t need to be present in our dock, many of them set to be launched with system startup or even those with keyboard shortcuts.

Well, there is a solution for this, and actually, quite simple

Using a terminal, we need to locate the Info.plist file inside the application we want to “hide”. It will be inside the application folder in “Contents”. I decided to edit the file as super-user just to avoid troubles with permissions..

whitey:~ borja$ cd /Applications/Namely.app/Contents/
whitey:Contents borja$ sudo vi Info.plist

And here, inside the <dict> tag, along with the other key-value pairs, we just have to add another one saying:

<key>NSUIElement</key>
<true/>

That’s it. Save the file, start the application and now its icon shouldn’t appear in the dock.

Obviously, these things always have collateral effects: the top menu of the application won’t be shown, we won’t be able to access the application using ⌘+Tab, … and I guess that there may be other things, but for simple applications such as Namely, I found this trick very useful