Hide the Dock on a Mac to give your web apps the whole screen

A laptop screen is about a thousand pixels tall, and the Dock takes a strip off the bottom of it for the whole working day. On a fourteen-inch machine that strip is roughly a tenth of the vertical space, sitting under every document, every browser window and every mail list. Hiding it is one of the few settings that gives back real room rather than rearranging it.

The reason people hide it, then unhide it a week later, is rarely the setting itself. It is the two seconds of pointer-hovering that replaces a glance, and the small pile of things the Dock was quietly doing that nobody notices until they stop.

What hiding actually changes

With hiding on, the Dock is off the screen until the pointer reaches the edge it lives on. The layout underneath grows by the height of the Dock, so a maximised window ends up genuinely taller rather than overlapping something.

The behaviour is the same one macOS already uses in full screen. Apple's documentation for full-screen apps describes it exactly that way: in full screen, the Dock is shown or hidden by moving the pointer to or away from the Dock's location, and the menu bar behaves the same way at the top of the screen. Hiding the Dock permanently is choosing that behaviour everywhere rather than only inside full-screen apps.

What does not change is access. The Dock stays reachable from the keyboard whether it is visible or not. Apple lists Control-F3, or Fn-Control-F3 depending on how the function keys are configured, as the shortcut that moves focus to the Dock, after which the left and right arrow keys move between icons and Return opens the selected one. A hidden Dock is still a keyboard-navigable app switcher, which is why hiding it costs less than it appears to.

The three ways to hide it

The setting lives where the rest of the Dock's behaviour lives. Open System Settings, click Desktop and Dock in the sidebar, scrolling down if it is not visible, and look under the Dock group. The switch is named for what it does, hiding and showing the Dock automatically, and Apple's description of it is the whole mechanism in one line: the Dock is hidden while it is not in use, and moving the pointer to the edge of the screen where the Dock lives brings it back. The same group holds the size slider, magnification, the position on screen and the indicator dots for open apps.

The second way is a keyboard shortcut, and it is the one worth memorising. Apple documents Option-Command-D as show or hide the Dock. It toggles the same setting, which means it is a genuine switch rather than a temporary peek: pressing it turns hiding on, pressing it again turns it off. There is a second shortcut for the same action, listed among the function-key shortcuts as Fn-A.

The third way is to leave the Dock visible and use full screen for the apps that need the height. Apple's page for full-screen mode notes the distinction that matters: maximising a window makes it bigger while the menu bar and the Dock remain visible, and entering full screen hides both until the pointer asks for them.

A note for anyone who shares a machine or writes setup notes for a team: the same preference is reachable from the command line, where defaults write com.apple.dock "autohide" -bool "true" sets it and the Dock has to be restarted afterwards. That restart is not optional, and the reason is documented in the manual page for the defaults command itself: applications read the defaults system while running, so changing a default that belongs to a running application means the application will not see the change and might even overwrite it.

The reveal delay is why people undo this

Here is the part that decides whether hiding the Dock survives the week. When the pointer arrives at the edge, the Dock does not appear immediately. There is a short delay, and then an animation. Together they are long enough to feel like a wait when the Dock is being used as a switcher rather than as decoration.

Both are preferences rather than settings, so neither appears in System Settings. The delay is held in the Dock's own domain under the key autohide-delay, and setting it to zero makes the Dock appear as soon as the pointer arrives:

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

The animation itself is a separate key, autohide-time-modifier, where a smaller number is faster and zero removes the animation entirely:

defaults write com.apple.dock "autohide-time-modifier" -float "0" && killall Dock

Both can be read back with defaults read com.apple.dock followed by the key name, and both can be returned to the stock behaviour with defaults delete and the same restart. Anything set this way is a per-user preference: it does not travel to another Mac, and a reinstalled system starts again from the default.

With the delay at zero, hiding the Dock stops feeling like a trade and starts feeling like the Dock arrives when asked. That one change is the difference between a setting that lasts and a setting that gets reverted.

Position and size, for people who want the room without the hiding

Hiding is not the only way to get the space back, and for some layouts it is not the best one.

Moving the Dock to the left or right edge, which Apple lists as one of the Dock options, converts the cost from vertical space to horizontal space. On a wide display that is a good trade, because most windows run out of useful height long before they run out of width. A document, a mail list and a chat thread all read better tall.

Size is the other lever. Apple documents a shortcut for it that avoids the settings window: move the pointer over the separator line in the Dock until a double arrow appears, then drag down or up. Control-clicking that same separator opens a menu with the other Dock actions. Magnification, which enlarges icons as the pointer passes over them, can be toggled by holding Control-Shift while accessing the Dock.

Trimming what is in the Dock helps as much as resizing it. By default the Dock shows up to three recently used apps that are not already in it, plus a folder for downloads, so a Dock that feels crowded is often carrying items nobody chose. Suggested and recent apps have their own switch in the same settings group, held underneath in the preference show-recents, and turning it off makes the Dock a fixed set of icons rather than a list that grows during the day.

Choosing between the four approaches

Approach	Vertical space recovered	Dock still visible	Effort per use
Hide the Dock permanently	Full height of the Dock	Only when the pointer asks	Pointer to the edge, or Control-F3
Toggle with the keyboard shortcut	Full height while hidden	On demand	One shortcut
Full screen per app	Full height plus the menu bar	Visible outside full screen	One click per window
Move to the side and shrink	All of it, at the cost of width	Always	None

The useful reading of that table is that the last row asks nothing of the user, and the first row asks for a habit. Someone who works in three apps all day is better served by the last row. Someone who switches constantly between many windows gains more from the first, especially once the reveal delay is gone.

The other strip, at the top of the screen

Anyone hiding the Dock for screen space should look at the menu bar in the same session, because it costs a comparable number of pixels and has its own separate control.

The setting has a pane of its own in recent macOS releases. Apple's instructions are to open System Settings and click Menu Bar in the sidebar, scrolling down if needed, where the general options include choosing when the menu bar hides and shows automatically. The same option is referenced from Apple's full-screen documentation, where setting it to never hide is the way to keep the menu bar visible even inside full-screen apps.

The two strips answer different needs, and hiding both at once is usually a mistake. The Dock is a launcher and a notification surface, so hiding it is mostly harmless once the keyboard route is known. The menu bar carries the clock, the battery, the network status and whatever menu bar items have been added, which means hiding it converts several glances per hour into several pointer trips per hour. A common compromise is to hide the Dock permanently and leave the menu bar alone, then judge after a week whether the top strip is earning its space.

What the Dock was quietly doing

Before hiding it for good, it is worth naming what disappears with it, because these are the things people miss without identifying why.

The red badge is the first. Apple describes it as an indicator that one or more actions are needed in an app or in System Settings, the unread count on a mail icon being the familiar example. A hidden Dock hides those counts, so any service whose only notification is a badge becomes invisible until it is opened deliberately.

The Dock is also a drag target. Dragging a file onto an app icon opens it in that app, Command-clicking an item reveals it in the Finder, and Apple documents Control-Shift-Command-T as the shortcut that adds a selected Finder item to the Dock. Those gestures still work, they simply require the reveal first.

Removing and restoring icons is worth knowing before the Dock becomes hard to see. Apple's instructions are to drag an item out of the Dock until the removal label appears, and the item itself stays on the Mac because only the alias is removed. Putting an app back is equally undramatic: open the app so its icon appears again, Control-click that icon, and choose the option to keep it in the Dock.

Then there is minimising. Command-M sends the front window to the Dock and Option-Command-M sends every window of the front app there. Minimising into a Dock that is hidden is a reliable way to lose a window for a few minutes, which is why people who hide the Dock tend to stop minimising and start using window tiling or spaces instead.

This is where the shape of the working set matters more than the setting. A Dock full of native apps is a launcher. A Dock full of browser windows is a poor one, because every window carries the same icon and the badge belongs to the browser rather than to the service inside it. Giving each service its own window and its own icon is what makes a hidden Dock painless, since the alerts that used to arrive as Dock badges are collected by the app that owns the service instead, and a workspace per service keeps the window list readable when there is no Dock to read.

What to change first

Turn on hiding with Option-Command-D, then set the reveal delay to zero and restart the Dock so the reveal stops feeling like a wait. Live with it for a week, and if the missing unread badges are what pulls the Dock back out, the thing to fix is where those alerts arrive rather than the Dock, which is the job SpaceDeck takes on for services that live in a browser.