I don't use the Dock to launch programs. Therefore it's annoying to have it pop up whenever I move my mouse to the bottom of the screen. Is there any way to disable the dock so it doesn't pop up?

As far as I can tell, you can't disable (= permanently hide) the Dock; it's integral to OS X in all its iterations.
You can get rid of anything you choose to put in the Dock, but OS X wants you to see Finder and other 'open' items.

You have a couple options via System Preferences > Dock:
– Put the Dock on one side or the other to keep it out of the way.
– Set the size to small (which makes all the icons miniscule).

Ok, thanks. I shrank it.

I wonder if there isn't a way to stop it from showing. You can't KILL the dock, it's required by the OS and app switcher, but maybe there's a defaults you can use to stop it from showing at all?

you could pin it to somewhere else... left or right side? maybe that's something you'd like to try, in combination with changing its size, turning off the animation and magnification, and even turning off the glass table effect? there's also a less-used "pinning" option to change it from centered.


try hiding your dock, and then enter this in terminal:

defaults write com.apple.dock autohide-time-modifier -int 20; killall Dock

Given the integral nature of the Dock in OS X, it might not augur well to make it disappear into the ether ... you might not be able to retrieve it.

David Pogue's Missing Manual provides a lot of "tricks of the trade" vis-à-vis the Dock (and everything else, including "Easter eggs"). Dumping the Dock ain't one of them.

You can put the dock along one side, if that helps. System Preferences > Dock

Lotta folk not reading the whole thread ... see Post #33662.

My bad!

Add to that:
– Select Hide (after setting to small). It'll be pretty difficult for the cursor to touch the edge and activate its appearance, especially if the Dock is also on the side.

I remember my immediate thought the first time I booted into OS X: "Oh my god; that's got to go!"

It was, of course, in reaction to the Dock, and I went on a mission...

The closest I ever came was when I beta-tested an app that, as opposed to grelber's assumption that the two must march in lockstep, totally got rid of the Dock, itself, while perpetuating its other functionality, but, unfortunately, its dev never got it to work at 100%, and it's no longer available for d/l.

The best I could ever do with no issues is this, after running KnockOutDock. (My Dock is that little thing in the lower right hand corner...Finder, 6 app icons, divider, Trash)

You can actually make the Dock one tick smaller, like this (Same configuration), but the tradeoff is that for some unknown reason, Trash disappears, and that can be a hassle if you ever want to click on it to see what's inside.

I just ran V1's Terminal command to see what it would do, and I like the way it slows down the Dock's rising up from, and descending back into, the mists of invisibility if my cursor accidentally touches an edge of my screen (or I hit command-D), but I don't really need it, because I'm running Wraparound, so if my cursor does hit an edge it goes right past it and comes out on the the other side/end. (Note: Takes some getting used to.)

If you want to opt for the Trash-less, smaller Dock, let me know and I'll help you out.

Note that I'm running OS X 10.6.8, so my fix is applicable to your 10.6.3 installation.

Neat! I like the effect, but as I just noted, I don't really need it, so would you please post the command to reverse it?

Thanks.

defaults write com.apple.dock autohide-time-modifier -int 1; killall Dock

Or use

defaults delete com.apple.dock autohide-time-modifier; killall Dock

to get back to the default setting.

In my cursory research, the time values were expressed as floats rather than ints. I assume your version is like using 0 or 1 when a Boolean value is expected (i.e. the int is coerced to a float).

Thanks, guys.