How to open a specific pane in system preferences from dock?

Question

When I add the system preferences to the dock and click it, it opens in the common view.

How can I open a specific pane at once from the dock?

Answer 1

• In Finder, open /System/Library/PreferencePanes on Lion for the system preference panes or /Library/PreferencePanes or ~/Library/PreferencePanes/ for user-added ones.
• Drag the icon of your choice from the folder to the Dock. It will probably only go on the right side (the documents/folders/minimized windows/Trash side) of the divider.

Clicking the new icon will open System Preferences directly to that preference pane.

Answer 2

If it's a particular pane you want then you can use AppleScript to do this. For example, start the AppleScript Editor and type the following:

tell application "System Preferences"
    activate
    set current pane to pane "com.apple.preference.startupdisk"
end tell

This will open the Startup Disk preference pane com.apple.preference.startupdisk, but the other panes follow the same naming convention, e.g. com.apple.preference.dock etc.

You can now save this an application:

Then drag the .app file you created to the Dock. When you double-click it, it will open the required preference pane.

Answer 3

If System Preferences is running, the Dock menu has a list of all available preference panes. If it's not running, they aren't in the menu because apps on OS X can't keep stuff in the Dock when they're not running.

For easy access to a specific preference pane, use Spotlight or a third-party launcher.