How to Customise Your Mac Dock: Everything System Settings Won't Let You Do

macOS gives you exactly one slider for dock customisation — icon size — plus a handful of toggles buried in System Settings → Desktop & Dock: position (bottom, left, or right), auto-hide, magnification on hover, and whether to show recent apps. That's the entire built-in offering, unchanged for years. If you want folders, per-monitor docks, themes, or anything beyond that, you need to go outside System Settings.

What you can actually change in System Settings

Open System Settings → Desktop & Dock and you'll find:

• Icon size: a slider from small to large (roughly 16–128px visually, though the exact pixel size depends on your display)
• Magnification: makes icons swell on hover — toggle it on and set a maximum size with a second slider
• Position on screen: Bottom, Left, or Right
• Minimise windows using: Genie effect or Scale effect
• Automatically hide and show the Dock: the dock disappears until you move the cursor to the screen edge
• Show suggested and recent apps in Dock: turn this off to stop macOS adding apps you didn't pin
• Show indicators for open applications: the small dots beneath running apps

That's it. No spacing control, no themes, no per-monitor behaviour, no folders, no window previews on hover.

How to add invisible spacers (free, terminal required)

If you want to break your dock into visual groups — say, system apps on the left, work apps in the middle, personal apps on the right — you can add invisible spacer tiles using Terminal. Run this command once for each spacer you want:

bash defaults write com.apple.dock persistent-apps -array-add '{"tile-type"="spacer-tile";}' && killall Dock

The dock restarts and a gap appears at the end. Drag it wherever you want. It's invisible, so it looks like empty space between icons. This is a one-liner that's been working since at least macOS Monterey and still works on Sequoia.

The limitation: you can't control the width of the spacer, and there's no UI for removing them — you have to drag them off the dock like a regular icon.

Why macOS still has no dock folders (and the workarounds that exist)

macOS has never let you drag one dock icon onto another to create a folder, the way iOS has done since 2010. The gesture does nothing on macOS. The standard workaround is to drag an actual folder from Finder into the dock — it appears as a stack and opens as a fan or grid when clicked. This works, but it's not the same as grouping apps: the folder has to exist somewhere on disk, you manage it in Finder, and the visual result is a folder icon rather than a live grid of app icons.

If you want iPhone-style app folders — drag one app onto another, get a 2×2 preview grid, auto-named by category — that doesn't exist natively.

How to get the dock on every monitor, not just one

macOS will never show the dock on all monitors at the same time. It moves to whichever screen your cursor is on (with a short delay), which means on a two or three-monitor setup, you're constantly hunting for it or mouse-tripping to the bottom of whichever display has it. There's no setting to change this behaviour.

The closest native option is to go to System Settings → Desktop & Dock and make sure "Automatically hide and show the Dock" is off, which at least means the dock stays visible on whichever monitor last had focus. But it still won't appear simultaneously on multiple screens.

What a dock replacement app unlocks

If the native dock's limitations are genuinely slowing you down, Dockish is a Mac dock replacement built to address exactly these gaps. It runs alongside (or instead of) the system dock and adds:

• Dock on every monitor simultaneously — each display gets its own dock, either mirrored or with independent app sets per display. Plug in a monitor and a dock appears automatically.
• iPhone-style app folders — drag one app icon onto another to group them. Folders show a 2×2 live preview grid and auto-name by category. No Finder folders required.
• Per-monitor customisation — icon size (24–96px), spacing, magnification, and position (bottom, left, or right) set independently per display.
• Themes — glass, dark, light, or a custom tint colour.
• Hover previews — live window thumbnails when you hover over a running app's icon, plus the ability to close windows straight from the preview.
• Smart click behaviour — clicking a minimised app restores it, rather than doing nothing. Scroll an icon to cycle through its open windows.
• App name labels beneath icons, dividers and spacers with a visual UI, and magnification at 120Hz.
• One-click macOS dock hiding — Dockish can hide the system dock for you (fully reversible) so you're not running two docks at once.

Dockish launched in July 2026, costs $6.99 one-time (7-day free trial, macOS 14+ required), and version 1.1 shipped shortly after with dock import — it reads your existing pinned apps from the macOS dock and carries them across automatically on new installs, so there's no manual setup.

Adjusting icon size and spacing beyond the system slider

The system slider gives you a range, but no numeric input and no independent spacing control. If you want 48px icons with tighter gaps, or 80px icons with generous breathing room, there's no way to dial that in natively.

Terminal can nudge the icon size to specific values:

bash defaults write com.apple.dock tilesize -int 48 && killall Dock

Replace 48 with any value from about 16 to 128. Spacing between icons scales proportionally with size — there's no separate spacing control in the native dock, which is one of the more frustrating limitations if you prefer a compact dock with large icons.

Changing the dock position per monitor

In native macOS, the dock position (bottom, left, right) applies system-wide — you can't put it on the bottom of one monitor and the left of another. This is a single global setting in System Settings → Desktop & Dock.

If you're running a vertical monitor alongside a horizontal one, this matters: bottom placement makes sense on the landscape display but wastes space on the portrait one.

Auto-hide delay: slower than it should be

The default auto-hide animation delay — the pause before the dock slides back into view — is around 0.5 seconds, which feels sluggish if you're mousing to the screen edge frequently. You can reduce it:

bash defaults write com.apple.dock autohide-delay -float 0 && killall Dock

Set it back to default:

bash defaults write com.apple.dock autohide-delay -float 0.5 && killall Dock

This is one of the few genuinely useful native tweaks — it makes auto-hide feel noticeably more responsive.

Which customisations are worth bothering with natively

Honestly, the terminal tweaks that are worth doing are: turning off recent apps (System Settings), adding spacers if you have many pinned apps, and reducing the auto-hide delay if you use that mode. Everything else — folders, multi-monitor docks, themes, window previews, spacing control — requires a third-party app.

If you only want spacers and a slightly faster hide, the native approach is fine. If you regularly move between monitors, find yourself hunting for minimised windows, or wish you could group 30 dock icons into something manageable, Dockish is worth a 7-day trial to see if it fits.

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Common questions

Can I customise the Mac dock on each monitor separately?

macOS treats the dock as a single system element — the same position, size, and contents apply everywhere, and it only appears on one screen at a time. To get independent dock settings per monitor, you need a third-party dock replacement like Dockish, which lets each display have its own dock with separate icon sizes, positions, and app sets.

How do I make Mac dock icons bigger without making everything else bigger?

Go to System Settings → Desktop & Dock and drag the Size slider to the right. This only affects the dock — it doesn't change your display resolution or system font size. If you want a specific pixel size, run defaults write com.apple.dock tilesize -int 72 && killall Dock in Terminal (replace 72 with your preferred size).

Can I add app folders to the Mac dock like on iPhone?

Not natively — macOS doesn't support app-to-app grouping in the dock. The built-in alternative is dragging a Finder folder into the dock, which creates a stack. For actual iPhone-style folders (drag one app onto another, live 2×2 icon grid), that requires a dock replacement app like Dockish.