Dock Setup Worth Doing on a New M5 Mac

The Dock on a new Mac is a showroom display. It contains every app Apple ships, in Apple’s order, including several you will never open. Ten minutes of pruning turns it from a shelf of icons into something you actually navigate by, and the delay settings underneath make it feel instant rather than merely fast.

Clear it out first

Right-click any icon you do not use and choose Options → Remove from Dock, or drag it off until Remove appears. Nothing is uninstalled; the app stays in your Applications folder and Spotlight still finds it instantly. The point is that a Dock you can scan at a glance is worth more than a Dock that contains everything.

A useful test: if you cannot remember the last time you opened it, it does not need a permanent slot.

Kill the auto-hide delay

If you auto-hide the Dock to reclaim screen space, macOS adds a delay before it slides back and then animates the slide. Together that is close to a second of waiting every single time you reach for it. Remove both:

# No delay, no slide animation
defaults write com.apple.dock autohide-delay -float 0
defaults write com.apple.dock autohide-time-modifier -float 0
killall Dock

# Undo, restoring Apple's originals
defaults delete com.apple.dock autohide-delay
defaults delete com.apple.dock autohide-time-modifier
killall Dock

Note defaults delete rather than writing a number back — Apple’s defaults are not round figures, so deleting the key is the accurate undo. See the instant Dock.

Stop it filling with recent apps

By default the Dock appends recently used applications to the end, which quietly undoes the pruning you just did. System Settings → Desktop & Dock → Show suggested and recent apps in Dock, off. Covered fully in Dock recents.

Size and position

• Smaller is usually better once you have pruned it, because you are recognising icons by position rather than reading them. See making the Dock smaller.
• Magnification helps if you keep the Dock small and dense — Dock magnification.
• Left or right is worth trying on a laptop. Screens are wider than they are tall, so vertical space is the scarcer resource and a side Dock costs you none of it.

One setting for screen sharing

If you present or share your screen, minimising windows into the Dock leaves live thumbnails visible. Minimising into the app icon instead collapses them:

# Minimise windows into the app icon
defaults write com.apple.dock minimize-to-application -bool true
killall Dock

# Undo
defaults write com.apple.dock minimize-to-application -bool false
killall Dock

The rest of the presentation settings are in speeding up a new Mac and the settings worth changing.