[monospace]

I've been dragging some URL's into the Dock, and now I want to change their names as they popup from the Dock (they're a bit long, that's all). But I can't for the life of me find where those items are stored... Any ideas?

[Marshall]

The items in the Dock are stored in your Library/Preferences folder, in the file "com.apple.dock.plist". This is an XML property list file that contains entries for each Dock item. A normal Dock item (referencing a file or folder) looks like this:


<dict>
<key>tile-data</key>
<dict>
<key>file-data</key>
<dict>
<key>_CFURLAliasData</key>
<data>
Encoded binary data that represents an alias
</data>
<key>_CFURLString</key>
<string>/Path/To/File</string>
<key>_CFURLStringType</key>
<integer>0</integer>
</dict>
<key>file-label</key>
<string>Name Of File</string>
<key>tile-type</key>
<string>file-tile</string>
</dict>


From what I can tell, the system uses the alias if it can, then resorts to the hard-coded path if the file that the alias referenced couldn't be found. I haven't tested this much so I'm not positive on that. The "file-label" key/string combination doesn't seem to be used for the display; the Dock uses the name that the alias points to. So if you rename the original item "Games Folder", the Dock icon will show "Games Folder" as well.

However, URL's dragged to the Dock from Internet Explorer behave a bit differently. Each URL is stored in the Dock like this:


<dict>
<key>tile-data</key>
<dict>
<key>label</key>
<string>Name that will appear on the Dock</string>
<key>url</key>
<dict>
<key>_CFURLString</key>
<string>http://www.website.com</string>
<key>_CFURLStringType</key>
<integer>15</integer>
</dict>
</dict>
<key>tile-type</key>
<string>url-tile</string>
</dict>


In the case of URL's, the label is editable by changing com.apple.dock.plist. You can do this in command-line tools like pico, emacs, or vi, or you can edit it in a graphical text editor like BBEdit or even TextEdit (when you open a text file in TextEdit, it behaves like a text editor...at least it has for me).

Hope this helps...

[Scott_H]

I'm going to move this over to the Mac OS X Support forum. Click through to find your post.

[monospace]

Yes, that would seem to be where the labels are stored -- but there's gotta be something else going on.

I edited the labels for my URLs (in pico), saved, and checked the results. Nada -- still the old labels. So I log out and back in -- still the same old.

And when I went back into ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.dock.plist, all my previous edits were gone...

Hmn.... I checked my permissions of course, they're good to go... Maybe there's a master Dock prefs file somewhere else? Doesn't make sense though...