Change the Animation Speed of Hiding & Displaying the Mac OS X Dock

Mar 28, 2012 - 8 Comments

OS X Dock

Automatically hiding the Dock is one of the more useful features you can enable if you work on a Mac with limited screen space. That experience can be improved by removing the auto-hide delay from the Dock in OS X, which reduces the delay from when a mouse is hovered near the Dock to when it’s displayed, but now we’ll show you how to speed up or remove the slide-in and slide-out Dock hide and show animation itself.

Remove Dock Animation Completely

First up, removing the Dock animation completely, this makes an auto-hiding Dock snap into place immediately. Launch the Terminal and use the following defaults write command:

defaults write com.apple.dock autohide-time-modifier -int 0;killall Dock

The Dock will automatically restart with the changes taking effect.

Set an Ultra-Fast Dock Hide & Display Animation

This leaves the Docks animation intact, but speeds it up dramatically. You can adjust this yourself by changing the numbers after the -float flag:

defaults write com.apple.dock autohide-time-modifier -float 0.12;killall Dock

Restore Default Animation Speed

Return to the OS X default animation speeds with the following defaults write command:

defaults delete com.apple.dock autohide-time-modifier;killall Dock

Change the Dock Animation Speed

Thanks to Levi for the tips in our comments!

.

Related articles:

Posted by: Paul Horowitz in Mac OS, Tips & Tricks

8 Comments

» Comments RSS Feed

  1. Mike Hawk says:

    Worked like a charm. Appreciate the help.

  2. Brendan says:

    Thanks! This is great with the previous tip to speed up clearing the screen and launching mission control. Now if someone could figure out how to speed up the animation from swiping between desktops!

  3. DZ says:

    This is the single-greatest tip ever. I had to launch Mission Control to see the Dock in a full screen app before, now it pops up instantly! Thanks, awesome tip!

  4. Willian says:

    I didn’t see any difference…

  5. Theo Vosse says:

    I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this was published a couple of hours before on macosxhints.com. You might want to at least credit them.

  6. statman says:

    changing the 0.12 in what direction changes the speed?

    I tried this and keep getting an error related to Dock.

Leave a Reply

 

Shop on Amazon.com and help support OSXDaily!

Subscribe to OSXDaily

Subscribe to RSS Subscribe to Twitter Feed Follow on Facebook Subscribe to eMail Updates

Tips & Tricks

News

iPhone / iPad

Mac

Troubleshooting

Shop on Amazon to help support this site