Auto-hide the Dock on an external display

Plug in an external monitor and the Dock develops a habit of jumping to whichever screen your pointer last visited — often the big display where it's most in the way. Auto-hide takes it out of sight on every screen at once, and a couple of related settings stop it wandering. Here's the setup.

The Dock is single — auto-hide covers wherever it lands

macOS only ever shows one Dock, and it lives at the bottom of whichever display is currently "active." On a two-screen setup that means it can appear under your work on the external panel one minute and back on the laptop the next. Auto-hide is the clean fix: whichever screen the Dock is on, it stays hidden until you go looking for it.

1. Open System Settings → Desktop & Dock.
2. Turn on Automatically hide and show the Dock.

To reveal it, push your pointer to the bottom edge of the screen it currently belongs to. This is consistent across macOS 13 Ventura, 14 Sonoma, and 15 Sequoia.

The toggle from Terminal

# Auto-hide the Dock on every display
defaults write com.apple.dock autohide -bool true
killall Dock

# Undo
defaults write com.apple.dock autohide -bool false
killall Dock

Stop the Dock hopping between screens

Auto-hide keeps the Dock out of sight, but you may still want to control which screen it reveals on. The Dock moves to a display when you push the pointer past the bottom edge of that screen and hold. If it keeps ending up on the wrong monitor:

• Choose which display it calls home with how to move the Dock between displays on Mac.
• Stop the automatic hopping altogether with how to stop the Dock switching displays on Mac.

Keep it visible on just one screen instead

If you'd rather the Dock stay on the laptop and out of the external display's way — visible, but pinned to one screen — that's a placement decision rather than a hide decision. The full picture, including how "Displays have separate Spaces" changes the behaviour, is in how the Dock works on an external monitor on Mac.

Move it out of the way instead

Not sold on hiding it? Docking to the side of the screen frees the same vertical space on a wide external panel — see how to move the Dock to the side on Mac.