How Can I Set the OS X Dock to Show Instantly Instead of Waiting Half a Second in Snow Leopard?

Having a MacBook Pro 13" I find myself trying to maximize the screen real estate constantly which have led me to put the dock at the right hand corner of the screen. Now in an attempt to save a few more pixels I decided to give autohiding of the dock a go and ran into a problem that have plagued me all night...

When you toggle the switch to automatically hide the dock you get stuck with a small delay before it appears when hovering the edge of the screen. I have learnt that this is one of the many design principles Apple have put in use. In this case it appears to be their mission to save me from seeing the dock those few times when it's not intentional to touch the screens edge.

In Windows there was a way to tweak this setting to have the menubar appear instantly by altering some registry value.

Is there some way I can do this in Mac OS X?

Patrik Björklund

Posted 2009-09-22T21:40:51.663

Reputation: 263

Answers

I know it's a little tangential, but I recently stumbled onto an alternate configuration: Set it to always show, minimum icon size with maximum magnification. It still takes up a little bit of screen space, but I can get to it instantly, and so far I have fewer accidental activations because the small icons take up less surface area on the edge.

Justin Love

Posted 2009-09-22T21:40:51.663

Reputation: 966

1Magnification is really bad IMO. – Martin Marconcini – 2009-09-22T23:52:41.087

1I love magnification on my dock - what's wrong with it? – Isaac Waller – 2009-09-25T01:48:32.600

1Magnification has usability issues. Simply put, the “target” moves constantly, so visual and spatial memory is really ineffective. To put it another way, the “safari” icon, moves from left to right depending upon where you have the mouse pointer and how much magnification is has. That is a “serious” problem and that’s why magnification is only nice for demos, but almost nobody likes it after some time. – Martin Marconcini – 2009-11-20T02:24:21.273

I'm starting to think about changing mine, but as the lack of other answers shows, there are a dearth of better options. – Justin Love – 2009-11-25T20:58:53.003

defaults write com.apple.dock autohide-delay -float 0; osascript  -e 'tell application "Dock" to quit'

Harvey Grosser

Posted 2009-09-22T21:40:51.663

Reputation: 31