How to Reset Dock Items in Mac OS X

Question

By mistake I removed 3 items from my dock.

Now I want to reset all items as it was.

Is there an option to do this, as I don't even know which items were removed.

Answer 1

Your Dock is meant to be customized, so don't worry about removing items.

If you do want to reset the Dock to its original configuration, launch Activity Monitor and navigate to ~/Library/Preferences/ in the Finder. Trash com.apple.dock.db and com.apple.dock.plist, then immediately quit the Dock from Activity Monitor.

You do this all at once with this command line (but note that it wll delete the files instead of trashing them, so it is not reversible). To do that, open Terminal from your Applications/Utilities folder.

On OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion:

rm  ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.dock.plist{,.lockfile}; killall Dock

On older versions:

rm ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.dock.{db,plist}; killall Dock

Answer 2

If you can't follow the instructions given by SidneySM here is what you would find in your default dock (from left to right).

• Dashboard
• Mail
• Safari
• iChat
• Address Book
• iCal
• Preview
• iTunes
• Spaces
• Times Machine
• System Preferences

Answer 3

I did as the first guidance but it not worked on Snow Leopard 10.6. So I finished it manually as below:

1. Click to "Finder" and point to "Applications"
2. Select the expected items from the applications list and drag it to the Dock.
3. To remove it from Dock: Right Click the icon from Dock, then point to "Option" and select "Remove From Dock"

Note: You can do that one by one or with many selected items at the same time