Adjust the time delay for when the dock re-appears

dockterminal

I like to hide the dock unless I need it. There is a slight delay before it will reappear. Is there a Terminal setting I can change so that the dock will instantly appear when I move my mouse to the bottom of the screen? I like how things work but want to tweak the timing.

Best Answer

You can manually set the time it takes for the dock to appear using the defaults write commands:

  • autohide-delay → custom appearance delay with dock animation
  • autohide-time-modifier → custom appearance delay without dock animation

First, activate auto-hide in System Preferences → Dock → Autohide or type ⌘+⌥+D

Then open the Terminal and type:

defaults write com.apple.Dock autohide-delay -float 0; killall Dock
  • 0 is the time it takes for the Dock to appear in seconds. You can choose floats and integers e.g. 2, 0.5,...
  • killall Dock causes the Dock to restart
  • the syntax is the same for autohide-time-modifier

Restore the default behavior using...

defaults delete com.apple.Dock autohide-delay; killall Dock

According to MacOSHints this trick was found by reverse engineering from the developer Christian Baumgart of Hyperdock.

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