Speed up the Mac Dock: remove the auto-hide delay

If you have Dock auto-hide on, there's a noticeable pause before it slides up. Two defaults commands remove that lag entirely — the Dock appears the instant your cursor hits the edge of the screen.

The two settings that control Dock speed

Apple uses two separate values to govern how the Dock behaves when hidden:

• autohide-delay — how long your cursor must hover at the edge before the Dock starts to appear. The default is roughly 0.5 seconds. This is the pause that feels like the Mac is ignoring you.
• autohide-time-modifier — a multiplier for the slide animation itself. The default is 1.0 (normal speed). Set it lower and the animation plays faster; set it to zero and the Dock snaps in without any animation at all.

Both are stored in the com.apple.dock preferences domain and can be changed without restarting your Mac.

Set both to zero for an instant Dock

Open Terminal (Applications → Utilities → Terminal) and run these three lines:

# remove the hover delay before Dock appears
defaults write com.apple.dock autohide-delay -float 0
# make the show/hide animation instant
defaults write com.apple.dock autohide-time-modifier -float 0
killall Dock

The Dock restarts immediately. Move your cursor to the edge — it snaps up with no hesitation and no animation.

Fine-tune instead of going all the way to zero

Some people find a completely animation-free Dock disorienting — the icons just appear with no visual cue. A middle ground that feels snappy without being jarring:

# short delay — barely noticeable
defaults write com.apple.dock autohide-delay -float 0.2
# half-speed animation — quick but visible
defaults write com.apple.dock autohide-time-modifier -float 0.5
killall Dock

Try a few values and see what suits you. The changes take effect the moment killall Dock runs, so you can experiment freely.

Restore the defaults

If you want the original Apple behavior back, delete the custom values rather than writing back specific numbers — that way macOS uses its own built-in defaults cleanly:

# restore Apple's default hover delay
defaults delete com.apple.dock autohide-delay
# restore Apple's default animation speed
defaults delete com.apple.dock autohide-time-modifier
killall Dock

After killall Dock the familiar sluggish delay returns, if you ever want it back.

Does this affect anything else?

No. These two keys only control the auto-hide timing. Dock size, magnification, position, and icon arrangement are stored separately and are completely unaffected. If you don't have auto-hide enabled, the time-modifier change has no visible effect — but it won't cause any harm either.