Mac – Prevent dock from auto-showing on mouse over

dockkeyboardmacsnow leopard

I currently have dock to auto-hide and would like it to stay hidden until I explicitly show it using a keyboard shortcut such as the "Move focus to dock" or "Turn Dock Hiding On/Off". I basically don't want it to inadvertently pop open when I move mouse to the edge of the screen (e.g., to access a scrollbar in a fullscreen app), and get in the way. I tried moving it to the left, which slightly reduced the inconvenience, but I am still ending up triggering it, as I use many apps in fullscreen mode, and tend to reach out to all sides. Since I am a heavy keyboard user, I don't mind occasionally using keyboard to select something in the dock (I map Ctrl+Esc to move focus to dock, and type the first one or two chars of the app to select it and press to run it).

I have come across workarounds that work well to (effectively permanently) disable it, but not good for my use case. E.g., this one to slow it down and this one to make it one pixel high and http://www.chaoticsoftware.com/extras.html.

I looked through all the dock defaults by running command defaults find .dock, and nothing seemed relevant, but may be I missed something because it wasn't obvious, or may be because it has no entry (like a hidden default?). Anybody has any solutions or ideas?

Best Answer

There's another hidden preference for the delay before the animation starts:

defaults write com.apple.dock autohide-delay -float 9999999
osascript -e 'quit app "Dock"'

It doesn't affect full screen windows though.

This would increase the delay to about a second:

defaults write com.apple.dock autohide-delay -float 0.5