When at home I use my 13" MacBook Pro hooked up to an 27" external monitor. When working on my 27" screen I prefer to have a visible dock at all times. I have enough screen real estate to afford this luxury.
When I'm on the road working on my 13" screen I prefer to automatically hide the dock as it really gets in the way when screen real estate is limited.
I now manually switch between enabling and disabling hiding (using ⌥⌘D) but I would prefer this to happen automatically. Can I enable hiding the dock on my MacBook monitor and disable hiding the dock on my external monitor?
Best Answer
I was able to use the previously suggested ControlPlane app along with some simple shell scripts to get this working.
First, I created a context for having my Thunderbolt Display plugged in ("Desk"), and one that negated that choice ("Lap"). Next, I made two simple shell scripts to toggle the autohide setting and restart the Dock. I put them in a
.controlplanedirectory in my home folder.~/.controlplane/dock-hiding-on.sh
defaults write com.apple.dock autohide -bool true && killall Dock~/.controlplane/dock-hiding-off.sh
defaults write com.apple.dock autohide -bool false && killall DockI then set those files to be executable.
Lastly, I set the correct script to run for the appropriate ControlPlane context. (Note: I had to show hidden files in the dialog with "⌘+⇧+.")