TL;DR
It is possible to hide any application from macos dock and cmd+tab switcher. All you need to do is edit its info.plist
entry.
motivation
I use iterm2 as my terminal on macos, and since I often need that window, I don’t like to depend on cmd+space
and typing iterm2
. It’s a lot of keystrokes. I don’t like the cost of configuring my environment (like for example using hammerspoon, which is a great tool, but is also very involved. Using cmd+tab
is a no-go too. It’s error-prone and silly to be tap-tap-tap-tapping often through several windows until I reach my target. Luckily for me, there is a way in iterm to set a custom key chord to call up the window to the front. Breadcrumbs here: (iterm2->Preferences->Profiles->
disillusion
That sounds great, doesn’t it? I have it set up to cmd+shift+k
, right on my home row, no faff at all. Pop and there it is. There’s one big problem though. This hotkey window is a separate entity from main iterm2 application window stack, and disappears on out-of-focus. That means that every time I cmd+tab away from it, i.e. to Firefox, and cmd+tab back, I will be in focus of iterm2, the app, but the window… Is gone. That gets very frustrating very quickly.
dealing with grief
For a while I have tried a few other terminal emulators just to see if they provide similar functionality that wouldn’t be that counterintuitive, to no avail. But then I turned my attention to a different idea - what if I excluded iterm from cmd+tab menu completely?
solution
The way to solve this turned out to be incredibly simple.
- Find iterm in your applications folder, wherever you’ve got it (i.e. /Applications/iterm2)
- Open the
/Contents
directory and theInfo.plist
XML file within it - Add this little kv pair:
<key>LSUIElement</key><string>1</string>
- Restart the application
Et voila. The app is gone from cmd+tab rotation.