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Comment by fouc | Hacker News Reader

It baffles me seeing tech people often seem to leave the dock along the bottom of their screen, wasting valuable screen space, especially if they're on a laptop. No auto-hide or anything.

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different strokes for different folks. Auto-hiding = super frustrating everytime it pops up when I didn't want it where as with it always there there's zero frustration. Zero frustration wins over some wasted space for me.

Yeah, many years ago, I used to move the dock to the left and auto-hide it to recover the screen space. But it resulted in the dock popping up (sliding right) at unexpected times and I ended up clicking the dock items unintentionally.

So, after about a year or so, I defaulted to moving the dock to the left but stopped auto-hiding it.

First thing I do on a new Mac is move the dock to the left hand side and auto-hide if it's a laptop. With typical screen aspect ratios, you lose so much usable space with the dock along the bottom.

If it’s auto-hide what’s the point of moving it to the side?

I find I'm much less likely to automatically trigger it on the left than on the bottom. And, muscle memory for on desktop/larger screens where it is not hidden.

changing what cursor actions prompt it to stop hiding

Why would it be pointless then? Those are orthogonal concerns.

Whether you constantly show or auto-hide the dock, it still has to be somewhere. So if you prefer to have it on the side (meaning it also auto-shows when you move your mouse to the side) as opposed to the bottom, it makes absolute sense to move it to the side.

Dock on the bottom can move between displays. Dock on the left/right is stuck on the leftmost/rightmost display, which can be annoying if you regularly switch between laptop-only and laptop-plus-external-displays layouts.

What baffles me is people having the stock macOS apps in the Dock without taking the time to at least remove what they don't use. I think this goes to show that for most people they don't even notice the Dock is there.

Yes drives me mad.

Maybe they don’t realise you can change what’s there?

They don’t care. They’re not power users, they’ll use whatever defaults are there, and as long as they’re good enough, stick.

Vast majority of computer users (including phones) don’t customize anything beyond the out of the box set up. In fact, I’d that’s even true for my sass customers, only particular percentage of them use any of the customizable settings. Which is why UX is so hard, we have to do our best to make sensible default choices. As technologists, it’s very easy to forget this while on the thick of it.

I make it as small as possible and put it on the right side of the screen and have it auto hide. I can go open it if I absolutely need to but mostly just pretend it doesn't exist.

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