Stacks is pretty much Leopard’s only non-eyecandy change to the dock, and it had the potential to be pretty handy, but the fact that the icon representing the stack is whatever the top file in the folder happens to be really ruins it (for me at least). However, if you haven’t yet given up on stacks and thrown them off your dock, there is a solution: overlaying stacks icons.

In essence, these are just small-ish semi-transparent icons that are permanently our top icon. This picture explain it best (before & after):

Original post & creators of icons: here (Japanese, hence my post)

Download link: here 

Now, to get the icons to stay on top of our stacks is a little tricky. First we obviously need to put the icons into the stacks folder(s). We could name the icon 0.app and sort by name to keep them up top, but this isn’t really practical for the Downloads stack, so we’re going to change the access modified date using the unix command touch. So open up Terminal and follow this example, replacing the location and name of the icon where neccessary.

 cd ~/Downloads  

    touch -mt 202001010101.01 " Downloads "

This will change the date modified of the icon to 1st January, 2020. Obviously you’ll need to change ” Downloads ” to whatever the folder/icon is named. The example is with the downloads stack but you can do it for any of them. Now just make sure your stack is sorting by date modified (ctrl-click/right-click the stack and Sort by:). Repeat for other stacks and enjoy.

If you know of any other stack overlay icons out there, let me know. All credit for these icons goes to Optica-Optima.

   &mdash; <a href="http://t.ecksdee.org/">altair</a>