Delete the hiding Dock Delay in OS X

You can choose to hide/show the Dock automatically. This has a default speed to display the dock. You can speed it up with a defaults write command. This command removes the delay from when a cursor is hovered near the Dock. It doesn’t change the animation speed of the dock, only the response to the cursor.

Launch Terminal and enter the following command.

defaults write com.apple.dock autohide-delay -float 0;killall Dock

Revert to the default setting:

defaults delete com.apple.dock autohide-delay;killall Dock

2 thoughts on “Delete the hiding Dock Delay in OS X

  1. Mr. W–

    Your info allowed me to do something I’ve been wanting to do for years—that being to increase, not decrease, the Dock’s delay time. Far too often, when moving the cursor to click on a button or select a tool or whatever, I overshoot, causing the Dock to come out and get in my way. I end up having to pull the cursor back out, wait for the Dock to re-hide itself, and then move back to my intended target. It probably doesn’t bother most people when this happens, but it drives me bonkers.

    So, I experimented with the com.apple.dock defaults, using values for the float variable other than the 0 you used. It turns out each whole number increment equals two seconds of real time, and it’s possible to use decimal fractions in the float values–e.g., a value of .75 creates a delay of one and a half seconds, a value of 1.115 works out to two and a third seconds, and so on.

    I hope someone finds my small hack of your advice helpful.

Comments are closed.