When you mouse over each item in your Dock—including the Trash—OS X displays its name in a small floating label. What you may not have realized is that you’re not stuck with “Trash” as the displayed name for your trash can. You can express your creativity by calling it “The Dumping Zone,” “Unwanted Unused Unloved,” or whatever else strikes your fancy.
You’ll have to do a bit of work in the Terminal, but this is Geeky Friday, after all! Launch Terminal, in Applications/Utilities, and type these commands one after another. Each of the commands you see here are preceded by a $ delimiter; don’t type that! Also, the first time you use the sudo command, you’ll be prompted to enter your admin password.
$ cd /System/Library/CoreServices/Dock.app/ Contents/Resources/English.lproj $ sudo cp InfoPlist.strings InfoPlist.bak $ sudo cp InfoPlist.strings ~/Desktop/InfoPlist.txt
You just: (1) navigated into the Dock’s application bundle, (2) created a backup copy of a file, and (3) copied that same file out to your Desktop. Now, leave that Terminal window open right where it is, and switch back to the Finder, navigate to your Desktop, and double-click on the InfoPlist.txt file you’ll find there. After it opens in TextEdit, the file should look like this:
The line you need to modified is the first one, boxed in red in the above screenshot. Do not change anything on the left-side of the equals sign. Instead, change the word Trash to whatever you like—shorter is probably better, though, just from an aesthetic point of view. Save the file when you’re done editing. TextEdit will probably give you a warning that the file is write protected; choose Override to go ahead and save your changes. Once that’s done, close the file and switch back to the Terminal.
The last thing we need to do is to overwrite the stock InfoPlist.strings file with the newly-modified version. To do that, type this command in Terminal:
sudo cp ~/Desktop/InfoPlist.txt InfoPlist.strings
To make the changes take effect, quit and restart the dock by typing killall Dock. When you do so, the Dock will disappear and reappear. To see if your changes took effect, simply mouse over the Dock’s Trash icon, and see what you see:
If everything worked, you should see your newly chosen name in the place of the usual “Trash.” If you ever tire of this, you can repeat the above steps, putting the word Trash back in place of your chosen term, or just use the backup you created earlier, as shown below:
$ cd /System/Library/CoreServices/Dock.app/ Contents/Resources/English.lproj $ sudo cp InfoPlist.bak InfoPlist.strings
Restart the Dock once more, and everything’s back to normal.