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The Dock of Mac Cheat Sheet (DRAFT) by

The Dock is a prominent feature of the graphical user interface of macOS. It is used to launch applications and to switch between running applications.

This is a draft cheat sheet. It is a work in progress and is not finished yet.

The Dock

The Dock is a prominent feature of the graphical user interface of macOS. It is used to launch applic­ations and to switch between running applic­ations.

Keyboard shortcuts and actions

Keypress
Action
⌃ + fn + F3
Show or Focus on the Dock
⌃ + F3
Show or Focus on the Dock when 
Fn
keys are locked
⌥ + ⌘ + D
Show/hide the Dock
⟵
Select left applic­ation
⟶
Select right applic­ation
Enter
Switch to the selected applic­ation

Domains, keys and values

User defaults belong to domains, which typically correspond to individual applic­ations. Each domain has a dictionary of keys and values repres­enting its defaults; for example, "­Def­aul­t F­ont­" = "­Hel­vet­ica­". Keys are always strings, but values can be complex data structures comprising arrays, dictio­naries, strings, and binary data. These data structures are stored as XML Property Lists.

Reaction time

Time to show or to hide
 
defaults write com.ap­ple.Dock autohi­de-­delay -float 0.4; killall Dock
Animation time to show or to hide the Dock
 
defaults write com.ap­ple.dock autohi­de-­tim­e-m­odifier -float 1; killall Dock

Spaces, size and effects

Adding an space between the icons in the Dock
 
defaults write com.ap­ple.dock persis­ten­t-apps -array-add '{"t­ile­-ty­pe"=­"­spa­cer­-ti­le";}'; killall Dock
Size of the Dock
 
defaults write com.ap­ple.dock tilesize -float 48; killall Dock
Magnif­ication size
 
defaults write com.ap­ple.dock largesize -int 128; killall Dock

Applic­ations

To show all windows of an applic­ation doing an scroll action on the icon
 
defaults write com.ap­ple.dock scroll­-to­-open -bool TRUE; killall Dock
To keep only the active applic­ations
 
defaults write com.ap­ple.dock static­-only -bool TRUE; killall Dock
To highlight hidden (⌘ + H) applic­ations
 
defaults write com.ap­ple.dock showhidden -bool TRUE; killall Dock

Resetting the Dock

Resetting the Dock to the factory settings
 
defaults delete com.ap­ple.dock; killall Dock
 

The defaults command

defaults
allows users to read, write, and delete Mac OS X user defaults from a comman­d-line shell.

defaults actions

Action
Descri­ption
 
read
Prints all of the user's defaults, for every domain, to standard output.
 
write
Writes value as the value for key in domain. value must be a property list, and must be enclosed in single quotes.
 
delete
Removes all default inform­ation for domain or a key ion a domain

References

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