Learn how to reset your Mac’s Dock to its default settings, restoring the built-in Apple apps and settings that appear when you first set up your computer.
Since it’s easy to customize your Dock, you may have added or removed apps, adjusted its size, moved its location, set it to auto-hide, or made it hide and show instantly with no delay or animation.
However, if you’re ready to return to the default Dock, you can reset it using a simple Terminal command. This will restore it to the appearance it had when you first booted your new Mac.
Once reset, you can customize your Dock again, adding or removing apps and tweaking settings as needed.
Reset Mac’s Dock to factory settings
- Open Terminal on your Mac.
- Type or copy & paste the following command in the Terminal window and hit the return/enter key.
defaults delete com.apple.dock; killall Dock
The Dock will reset and restart immediately. This command has reset your Dock by removing icons you’ve added and restoring any icons you had removed. Among other things, it also resets the size of the Dock, its magnification settings, location, and all other custom settings.
Keep in mind that if you’ve uninstalled any of the default apps that the Dock contains (like Pages, Numbers, Keynote), they will appear as question marks “?” until you either remove the placeholder from the Dock or reinstall the missing app.
Note: Weirdly enough, resetting the Dock also removed all my added Hot Corners!
For those of you who might not feel comfortable with this process, here it is demonstrated on video.
Sometimes, it’s just nice to start from scratch, and this is one step that’ll help you do just that. What do you think?
Do more with your Mac’s Dock: