Comment by gcanyon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gcanyon | Hacker News Reader

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I find your interpretation of the dock interesting, especially because I've never used the dock.

  - I don't use it to launch applications, I use launchpad for that.
  - I don't use it to open files in a given app, I right-click and use the contextual menu for that.
  - I don't use it to delete files, I use command-delete for that.
  - I don't use it to get to downloads, I use the Finder for that.
  - I don't use it to switch applications, I use command-tab for that.
  - I don't know what else it's good for, or what I do instead.

I say this as someone who has used Mac OS X since it launched: the dock is useless to me; I have it hidden, and if there were a way to permanently kill it, I absolutely would.

To "disable" the Dock — not really: it will pop up sometimes, e.g. when some icon bounces, but anyway — you can

    defaults write com.apple.Dock autohide -bool true
    defaults write com.apple.Dock autohide-delay -float 100
    killall Dock

Here 100 is how many seconds you will have to keep the cursor on the edge of the screen before the Dock appears. You could set it to 3 or 5 should you need the Dock sometimes but don't want to trigger it by accident.

[Edit: Autohide can be toggled on/off also with ⌥+⌘+D. You can use the combination to show/hide the Dock, paired with a high autohide delay.]

Thanks! Yep, I used to set the delay to a long time, but I gave it up because my post above is a slight lie -- when something pops up in the dock to notify me, I go to the dock to see what the heck it was. That one use case caused me to give up setting a long delay because of how f'ing annoying it is for something to pop up, and then need (I think I set it to) 5 seconds to figure out what it was.

Same, I make it quite small, put it on the right, and autohide it, and it still annoys me.

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