Customizing Launchpad in macOS

The release of iOS 14 (and now iPadOS 15) with their fancy widgets and new App Store offerings revolving around them left many of us Mac owners wondering — is there a way to achieve a similar level of customization on our computers?

And yes, there is. Although not quite the same as on iOS.

Remember Launchpad? If you’re anything like me, you use it multiple times a day to launch apps in an iOS-like manner. The sad thing is, there’s no obvious way to customize it. If you own a Mac with a larger screen, the Launchpad looks horrendous — the giant icons and wasted space all over the place.

But we can fix this. Just open Terminal and enter the following (replacing the number of rows and columns with the numbers according to your preference).

defaults write com.apple.dock springboard-columns -int 5
defaults write com.apple.dock springboard-rows -int 5
defaults write com.apple.dock ResetLaunchPad -bool TRUE
killall Dock

Here’s what I got while playing around with it. 6 rows and 9 columns:

You can even go crazy if you'd like too. Behold, 20 rows and 20 columns.

Anyway, hope this helps you with combating that wasted space on your Mac and making your workflows more productive.