Change The Dock Right Click Menu Names in MAC

Change The Dock Right Click Menu Names in MAC

When ever your right click on a Dock item you will notice there is a list of items. Have you ever wondered how these items are created and if you can change them? Well you are in luck. This post will hopefully show you how you can change them to something a bit different. Its quite simple to do however you do need to err on the side of caution as you are altering system files. You only need TextEdit so it shouldn’t be too complicated.

1) To begin we need to find the file that the Dock is using to generate the names for the menu item. Open up Finder and navigate to /System/Library/CoreServices.

2) Right Click on item named Dock and select Show Package Contents and then navigate to /Contents/Resources/English.lproj if you are using a different language go to your respective language folder.

In this folder is a set of text files called strings. Strings essentially allow the program to name an item within the code and then assign a different language to that name. This ensures an item named “Quit” says “Quit” in English and “Salir” in Spanish (I hope Google Translate worked correctly). We are going to play around with this file so it can say something different.

3) Select DockMenus.strings and copy it to the desktop. While you are there may a second copy as a backup.

When you open this file you will notice something very specific. Every item is made up of two parts. One section in capitals, the other in normal text surrounded by quote marks. The section in capitals is used by the background code so don’t change it. The section in quote marks is what you normally see so feel free to change it.

4) As an example find the item named QUIT = “Quit”; and then change the text in quote marks to something like QUIT = “Quit Application”;

5) Save the file on your desktop.

6) Copy this file back to the English.lproj folder found previously. You will have to authenticate the file movement with an admin password.

7) You are done, the changes should be instantaeous.

Some ideas which are rather interesting to implement. Anything with %@ in the quote marks will show the application name. Therefore you can write something similar to QUIT = “Quit %@” . This will show something like “Quit Firefox” when you right click on the item in the Dock.

What ever change you do, make sure you don’t change the part in capitals, make sure the string you change is enclosed by quote make and finally make sure every line is finished with a semi-colon. If you make a mistake and break something, copy the backup file you created at the beginning back to the folder.

Please leave a comment below with any interesting changes you have made.