How to fix the Perfect macOS Dock

The screen real estate that you gain by hiding the dock is substantial; however by default the dock hiding behaviour is slow and sluggish.

So your wondering ‘How can I make auto-hide/show for the dock faster?’

Luckily with some quick terminal commands we can quickly change this, improve our user experience and productivity, neat right?

Before:

dock before modification — slow & boring :(

After:

dock after modification — fast & efficient :)

so, how do I change the animation speed of hiding & displaying the macOS dock?

Well I’m glad you ask, it’s actually very simple, what we need to change is two dock settings, but first, if not done already, enable autohide on the dock:

enable autohide on dock

Following that, open terminal and run the following two commands:

how to open terminal real quick with spotlight search

autohide-delay
The time taken to react to mouse presence

defaults write com.apple.dock autohide-delay -float 0;killall Dock

autohide-time-modifier
The time taken of the animation to actually show/hide dock

defaults write com.apple.dock autohide-time-modifier -float 0.25;killall Dock

Your terminal should now look like the the screenshot on the left, and once your dock returns it should now be super quick just like in the after gif:

after.gif

Further Modification / Reset

The above are my favourite speeds for both settings and the most productive in my opinion, but you can of course modify these to a speed that suits you by changing the numbers to tune the speed/timing to your preference.

If you run into any issues you can use the following to reset the dock preferences to their default state:

defaults delete com.apple.dock; killall Dock

p.s. ‘killall Dock’ is included at the end of all of the statements above, but can also be ran independently. It simply resets the dock so that changes can take affect. This can also be used if you’re experiencing issues with the dock.

killall Dock

Thanks for making it this far! Let me know in the comments if you’d like to see more tips and tricks around my personal macOS set up :)