How to Enable the Hidden Suck Effect for the Mac Dock

System Settings offers two minimize animations: Genie and Scale. But a third one has been hiding in macOS since the early Mac OS X days — the Suck effect, which pulls the window into the Dock like water down a drain. Apple never added it to any settings pane, yet it still works perfectly on Ventura, Sonoma, and Sequoia. One Terminal line turns it on.

Turn on the Suck effect

Open Terminal (Applications → Utilities → Terminal) and run:

# enable the hidden Suck minimize animation
defaults write com.apple.dock mineffect -string suck
killall Dock

killall Dock restarts the Dock so the setting loads — it takes a second and doesn't affect your open apps. Now click any window and press Cmd+M: instead of Genie's curved funnel, the window gets yanked into its Dock thumbnail through a narrow vortex, corner-first. It's quicker and punchier than Genie, but with far more personality than Scale.

It plays in reverse when you restore the window, and it combines happily with other Dock settings — if you've turned on Minimize windows into application icon, the window gets sucked straight into the app's own icon, which looks even better than the thumbnail version. To see what's currently active before you change anything, run defaults read com.apple.dock mineffect; an error saying the key “does not exist” means you're on the stock Genie default.

Switch back to Genie or Scale

The undo is the same key with a different value:

# back to the default Genie effect
defaults write com.apple.dock mineffect -string genie
killall Dock

# or the no-frills Scale effect
defaults write com.apple.dock mineffect -string scale
killall Dock

# or clear the key entirely (also restores Genie)
defaults delete com.apple.dock mineffect
killall Dock

No logout or restart is involved in any of these — each change lands the moment the Dock relaunches, so you can cycle through all three effects in under a minute and keep whichever one you like.

Things worth knowing

• System Settings can undo it silently. The Minimize windows using menu in Desktop & Dock only lists Genie and Scale — Suck never appears there. If you (or anyone using your Mac) pick an effect from that menu, it overwrites Suck and you'll need to run the command again.
• It's per-user and persistent. The setting survives restarts and macOS updates. Other user accounts on the same Mac keep their own effect.
• It's completely safe. mineffect is a real, long-standing Dock preference — you're choosing an unlisted value, not patching the system. The worst case is an animation you don't like, and the revert takes five seconds.
• It applies everywhere windows minimize — the yellow traffic-light button, Cmd+M, and double-clicking a title bar if you've set that to minimize (check System Settings → Desktop & Dock → Double-click a window's title bar).

Why did Apple hide it?

Nobody outside Cupertino knows for sure. Suck has existed as a functioning value in the Dock's preferences since the earliest releases of Mac OS X, and in over two decades of updates Apple has neither removed it nor promoted it to the UI. The most popular theory is the obvious one: “Suck” is a hard word to put in a settings menu. Whatever the reason, it has become a small rite of passage for Mac tinkerers — a working feature you can only reach by knowing its name, and a reminder that macOS still carries plenty of switches Apple never labelled. If you ever forget which effects exist, the three valid values are genie, scale, and suck; anything else falls back to the default animation.