Turn Off (AKA “Kill”) OS X’s Dashboard

I used to love using Dashboard in OS X. I occasionally use it on my work system but on my home iMac the Dashboard is just sitting idol wasting CPUs. It never bothered me until I installed Mountain Lion. I occasionally use the side-swipe on my mouse and hated ending up at the Dashboard. No longer an issue since I killed the Dashboard! Yep- It’s D E A D.

Disable Dashboard

  1. Open Terminal.app (Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app)
  2. Type (or copy and paste) defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean YES;killall Dock
  3. Hit the Return key.

Enable Dashboard

If you decide you want the super useful Dashboard back in the future just change the boolean to NO.

  1. Open Terminal.app (Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app)
  2. Type (or copy and paste) defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean NO;killall Dock
  3. Hit the Return key.

Simple!