Mac Dock Keeps Showing Recent Apps Even After Setting It Not To

FWIW, new apps will show in the Dock when opened but, they should disappear from the Dock when quit. If they don't…

Try booting into Safe Mode then restart normally. Sometimes that will fix anomalies.

Start up your Mac in safe mode - Apple Support

Also, your signature indicates your are running Sonoma 14.6, but you posted in the Sequoia Community, which version of macOS are you running?

iRiomenn wrote:

Unfortunatelly, it didn't work. The Dock keep showing the recent apps, the number of which is 10 right now.

That Terminal command was one meant to add a Recent Items menu to the Dock. I remember seeing it in another thread where someone complained that they had added their own Recent Items menu to the Dock in this way, but that it was no longer working since they upgraded macOS.

Even after looking at man defaults, I'm not sure of the right syntax to reverse it. (It modifies a persistent-others array that contains the Dock's Applications and Downloads menus. You'd only want to remove the extra entry in the array – not everything in the whole array.)

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The file that contains the Dock preferences appears to be com.apple.dock.plist in the user-level Preferences area (an area that Finder has been hiding from users for many years now).

Xcode has a property list editor that understands the structure of .plist files. If you knew what you were doing and had Xcode installed, you could use it to remove the extra entry (from running that Terminal command).

Thanks. Just curious, you can't right click on the icons and choose Options > Remove from Dock?

You can try this terminal command but I don't know how to reverse it

defaults write com.apple.dock persistent-others -array-add \

'{ "tile-data" = { "list-type" = 1; }; "tile-type" = "recents-tile"; }' && \

killall Dock

Recent ones (that aren't currently open) should disappear from the Dock when you turn off that switch. They do for me, in Ventura.

I don't know how that Terminal command you tried (in an effort to fix your Dock) may have affected it.

Can you post a screen shot?

System Settings>Control Center>Recent Documents Applications servers. Very bottom of the column. Choose None.

Sorry, I misread your original post. Ignore my response.

Once they are removed, do they stay removed?

System Settings > Desktop & Dock. Disable, "Show suggested and recent apps in Dock"