Mac Dock tricks: size, auto-hide, spacers and more

The settings

Open System Settings › Desktop & Dock. Size and Magnification are sliders, and Dock position on screen puts it on the left, at the bottom or on the right. Automatically hide and show the Dock gives you the space back. And turn off Show suggested and recent apps in Dock, so it stops filling up with apps you opened once.

Quick ones

• Drag the line between your apps and your folders up or down to resize the Dock.
• Drag an app out until Remove appears to take it off.
• Turn on Minimize windows into application icon, so the Dock doesn’t grow an icon for every window you minimize.

Terminal tricks

A few hidden settings still work on macOS Tahoe. Apple doesn’t document them, so they could change. Paste one into Terminal and press Return:

• defaults write com.apple.dock autohide-delay -float 0; killall Dock makes a hidden Dock appear at once.
• defaults write com.apple.dock autohide-time-modifier -float 0.25; killall Dock makes it slide in faster.
• defaults write com.apple.dock persistent-apps -array-add '{"tile-type"="spacer-tile";}'; killall Dock adds a gap you can drag between apps, to group them.

To undo the first two, run defaults delete com.apple.dock autohide-delay; killall Dock (or the same with autohide-time-modifier). To remove a spacer, drag it out. Never run defaults delete com.apple.dock on its own: it resets your whole Dock.

More room than one Dock

The Dock is one strip at one edge. SideDock adds docks at the other edges and the corners, for groups of apps, folders and live widgets, and they slide out only when you push the pointer there. They stay out of your Dock’s way, so you can keep both.