Hiding the dock for fun and profit

OS X doesn't need the honking great dock that you get with a stock install. Kill it

One thing I hate about OS X is the dock.

I see no use for it whatsoever and the default positioning of it wastes so much screen space.

Every application I need is a few keypresses away with Alfred (or even Spotlight, which is built into OS X), likewise with access to my Downloads folder or anything else I could want easy path to.

The one time I do use the dock is if I have hidden a window by mistake and want to bring it back without killing and reopening the program. Right now the fastest way I know to do this is to click on the program in the dock and the hidden window will appear again.

You can’t just remove the dock so what I opt to do is hide it from view until I need it, I change three things about the setup in order to allow me to do this.

  • I move the dock onto the left hand side of my left-most screen
  • I have the dock set to hidden by default
  • I have it set to the smallest size possible and magnify up any icon I hover over when in the dock

All of these settings are available from the Dock pane of System Preferences.

Try it

If you are on OS X, please give it a try and let me know what you think. I think your extra screen space will more than make up for how jarring it feels to not have it for the first while.

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