Stacks were a great new feature introduced to the Dock along back when Leopard came out. By now, you probably rely on them as much as I do, but most people don’t know any functionality beyond viewing a folder directly from your Dock in either Fan, Grid, or List mode. Here are a few fun tricks to make your Stacks usage more enjoyable.

• Recent Items
  Why this is not a default stack, I do not know, but it is something I’ve added to every Mac I use and is great. Using the following terminal command, you can add a stack which will display your choice of the latest applications, documents, servers, favorite volumes, or favorite items.

  defaults write com.apple.dock persistent-others -array-add ‘{ “tile-data” = { “list-type” = 1; }; “tile-type” = “recents-tile”; }’
  killall Dock

  

• Fan & Grid Highlighting
  This terminal command will set your stacks to highlight the item you’re on when in Fan or Grid mode. Not sure why this isn’t the default, because it looks a ton better.

  In Snow Leopard:
  defaults write com.apple.dock mouse-over-hilite-stack -boolean YES
  killall Dock

  In Leopard:
  defaults write com.apple.dock mouse-over-hilte-stack -boolean YES
  killall Dock

  

• Altered List Highlighting in Snow Leopard
  Just like the above command adds highlighting to the Fan & Grid views, this one changes the appearance of a the list view (albeit only in Snow Leopard) to better match your new highlighting for the Fan & Grid stacks.

  defaults write com.apple.dock use-new-list-stack -boolean YES
  killall Dock

  

• Slow Motion
  This little trick serves absolutely no purpose or offers any benefit other than looking cool. If one of your Stacks is set to view in either Fan or Grid mode, you can hold down the shift key when you click it and you get the joy of watching it pop open in slow motion instead of the speed with which you are used to. Obviously can’t get you a screen shot of this one, so just try it out.

There you have it! I hope you find these Stack enhancements and tricks helpful, useful, or at least nice to look at. Note, if you want to change the highlighting of those stacks back to the defaults simply change the “YES” to a “NO” in both commands.