In this tutorial, we’ll walk you through the process of disabling Dashboard on Mac using Mission Control and applying it system-wide.
There are tons of features on the Mac that I love to use, but there are some that get so dusty because I never even bother to use them. Dashboard is one of those features, and I’ve always thought it was a pretty good idea to go about disabling the feature outright on every Mac I’ve owned.
Note: This tutorial only applies to macOS Mojave and earlier, as Dashboard was removed in macOS Catalina and later.
Why disable Dashboard on Mac
First of all, I know some people probably use Dashboard, but for the most part, it seems like a pretty useless feature in this day and age.
With modern macOS releases, the Calculator, Calendar, Clock, and Weather widgets are pretty much useless because macOS comes with its own apps for these things. Sure, there are third-party widgets for Dashboard, but honestly, who’s really wasting their time developing widgets for Dashboards anymore? Apps are where it’s at!
Dashboard can be launched by accident when striking a key on your keyboard or when you make a wrong gesture on your trackpad, so overall, it’s just a pain in the behind if you never intend to use it.
If you feel the same way, disabling it might be a good idea for you, just like it was for me.
Disabling the Dashboard on your Mac
There are two steps to disabling Dashboard on your Mac; the first is to keep it from appearing in your Mac’s Mission Control interface, and the second is to disable it from being accessed by any gesture or keyboard shortcut.
Disabling from the Mission Control UI
Dashboard always appears in the Mission Control interface on your Mac, which is accessed by the Mission Control key, A.K.A. your F3 key.
To keep the Dashboard from showing here, you will want to follow these steps:
1) Launch the System Preferences app on your Mac and open the Mission Control preferences pane.
2) Once you’re in, go to the drop-down box next to where it says Dashboard, and choose the Off option.
This will hide Dashboard from the Mission Control interface on your Mac, but you still need to disable it from being accessible via any kind of gesture.
Disabling Dashboard system-wide
The next step is pretty easy. Just do this:
1) Launch a Terminal window on your Mac and enter the following command either by typing or copying and pasting:
defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean YES && killall Dock
2) Press the Return key on your keyboard to carry out the command.
Your Dock will be restarted, and now Dashboard can no longer be accessed on your Mac.
Note: You can reverse this at any time by simply changing the boolean variable in the command above to “NO” instead of “YES.”
Well, that about does it for how to disable Dashboard on Mac. Since I never use Dashboard, I have mine disabled.
If you use any kind of third-party widgets on your Mac, this might be the only reason I can think of for you to keep using your Dashboard, but since most apps seem to be capable of doing things themselves, or information is shown in the Status Bar, Dashboard just seems useless in my honest opinion.
On a related note: