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How To Change The Dock Indicator Light In Mac OS X

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How To Change The Dock Indicator Light In Mac OS X

A new beautiful day and a new Mac OS X tip waiting for you to check out. A lot of Mac users know that Mac OS X dock provides the users an easy way to see what apps are running, just by glancing at the dock OS X. That’s not all, also it provides you with two options for those indicators, which is to either show them or not, but because we like to customize things we’ll cover how to change the indicator light appearance so that they display as a different color completely. Optionally, this could include using a simple indicator that also removes the glowing appearance, which can leave the OS X Dock looking a bit more minimalist.

The following way is very easy to use and contains a lot of features… Of course there is a lot of other ways but to be honest they are difficult as you have to change the colors manually by adding some codes, so I decided to make a quick and easy way to show you how things are done…

Change the Color of the Dock Indicator Lights in OS X with MacUtil

We’ll cover the quick method first, using a free third party tweak utility called MacUtil. If you’d rather do it manually on your own, or use different colors than what are offered by MacUtil, jump below for the manual approach:

After extracting MacUtil, open it and click on the button next to “Change Indicator Light Color for Open Applications”

  • Enter the administrator password to authenticate the changes
  • Select the color you wish to change

By making these steps, you will be able to change your default color of your dock indicator light to any color you want like (Green, Light, Yellow and etc…)


If you’re simply aiming to make the indicator lights more obvious, “Vivid” is the obvious choice, which essentially brightens up the default option, making it a bit more obvious which apps are active and which aren’t.
Whatever color you choose, changes are made instantly and they take effect quickly, so there is little harm to trying a few and seeing which you like best.
Here is “Vivid”, which makes it much easier to see:
And that’s what the yellow color will looks like and that’s the one I prefer: 
While in case you don’t know how to use the app, I’ve made a little steps on how to change the dock indicator color in Mac OS X manually which means you will have to change some things and add some codes: 
  • From the Finder, use Command+Shift+G and to summon Go To Folder and enter the following path:
  • /System/Library/CoreServices/Dock.app/Contents/Resources/
  • Use the “Folder Search” feature in the upper right corner, narrow the search down to only the “Resources” folder, and and look for “indicator_”
  • Select all and make a copy of these files to a folder on the desktop called “Indicator Backup” – this is so that you can easily revert back to defaults should you decide your replacement indicators are unpleasant
  • Modify or replace the Resources/ directory contents to change the indicators, focus on the following files:
  • indicator_large.png
    indicator_large@2x.png
    indicator_medium_simple.png
    indicator_medium_simple@2x.png
    indicator_medium.png
    indicator_medium@2x.png
    indicator_small_simple.png
    indicator_small_simple@2x.png
    indicator_small.png
    indicator_small@2x.png
  • Go to the Terminal and kill the Dock to refresh it for changes to take effect
  • killall Dock
  • Enjoy your new Dock indicator icons
For what it’s worth, the “@2x” suffix indicates whether the image file is sized for retina displays or not, and if you don’t have a retina-equipped Mac then you don’t really need to replace those for the changes to take effect.
[Images via OSXdaily]

A new beautiful day and a new Mac OS X tip waiting for you to check out. A lot of Mac users know that Mac OS X dock provides the users an easy way to see what apps are running, just by glancing at the dock OS X. That's not all, also it provides you with two options for those indicators, which is to either show them or not, but because we like to customize things we’ll cover how to change the indicator light appearance so that they display as a different color completely. Optionally, this could include using a simple indicator that also removes the glowing appearance, which can leave the OS X Dock looking a bit more minimalist.

The following way is very easy to use and contains a lot of features... Of course there is a lot of other ways but to be honest they are difficult as you have to change the colors manually by adding some codes, so I decided to make a quick and easy way to show you how things are done...

Change the Color of the Dock Indicator Lights in OS X with MacUtil

We’ll cover the quick method first, using a free third party tweak utility called MacUtil. If you’d rather do it manually on your own, or use different colors than what are offered by MacUtil, jump below for the manual approach:
After extracting MacUtil, open it and click on the button next to "Change Indicator Light Color for Open Applications"
  • Enter the administrator password to authenticate the changes
  • Select the color you wish to change



By making these steps, you will be able to change your default color of your dock indicator light to any color you want like (Green, Light, Yellow and etc...)


If you’re simply aiming to make the indicator lights more obvious, “Vivid” is the obvious choice, which essentially brightens up the default option, making it a bit more obvious which apps are active and which aren’t.
Whatever color you choose, changes are made instantly and they take effect quickly, so there is little harm to trying a few and seeing which you like best.
Here is “Vivid”, which makes it much easier to see:
And that's what the yellow color will looks like and that's the one I prefer: 
While in case you don't know how to use the app, I've made a little steps on how to change the dock indicator color in Mac OS X manually which means you will have to change some things and add some codes: 
  • From the Finder, use Command+Shift+G and to summon Go To Folder and enter the following path:
  • /System/Library/CoreServices/Dock.app/Contents/Resources/
  • Use the “Folder Search” feature in the upper right corner, narrow the search down to only the “Resources” folder, and and look for “indicator_”
  • Select all and make a copy of these files to a folder on the desktop called “Indicator Backup” – this is so that you can easily revert back to defaults should you decide your replacement indicators are unpleasant
  • Modify or replace the Resources/ directory contents to change the indicators, focus on the following files:
  • indicator_large.png
    indicator_large@2x.png
    indicator_medium_simple.png
    indicator_medium_simple@2x.png
    indicator_medium.png
    indicator_medium@2x.png
    indicator_small_simple.png
    indicator_small_simple@2x.png
    indicator_small.png
    indicator_small@2x.png
  • Go to the Terminal and kill the Dock to refresh it for changes to take effect
  • killall Dock
  • Enjoy your new Dock indicator icons
For what it’s worth, the “@2x” suffix indicates whether the image file is sized for retina displays or not, and if you don’t have a retina-equipped Mac then you don’t really need to replace those for the changes to take effect.

[Images via OSXdaily]

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