Mac Dock Right-Click Menus: What They Can Do (and What You're Missing)

The macOS dock's right-click menus are sparse by design: you get Open, Options, and sometimes a short window list — and that's about it. For most apps, there's no quick access to specific windows, no media controls, no way to force-quit without hunting through Activity Monitor, and no profile switching for multi-profile browsers like Chrome.

What macOS actually gives you when you right-click a dock icon

Right-clicking (or control-clicking) any dock icon in stock macOS shows a small contextual menu. What's in it depends on the app:

• Most apps: Open, Options (Keep in Dock, Open at Login, Show in Finder), and a list of open windows if the app has any.
• Media apps like Music: a couple of playback controls — previous, play/pause, next.
• Running apps with multiple windows: the window list, but only by title, with no preview.

That's the full extent of it. There's no way to switch Chrome profiles, no Force Quit shortcut, no per-window close button, and no controls for third-party browsers or terminals at all.

Why the window list is nearly useless for some apps

If you use Chrome with ten tabs open across four windows, the right-click menu shows you a list of window titles — which are just the titles of whichever tab happens to be active in each window. Titles like "Gmail - Inbox (14)" and "GitHub - Pull Requests" are fine when you remember which window is which. When you don't, you're clicking through them one by one.

The same problem applies to terminal emulators. iTerm2 or Ghostty sessions are often named something generic, so the window list in the dock tells you almost nothing useful.

There's also a subtler issue: clicking a minimised window from the right-click list in macOS doesn't always restore it cleanly. Sometimes it brings the app to focus without restoring the minimised window. It's a long-standing quirk.

The hidden Force Quit shortcut (and why it's buried)

If an app is frozen, you can hold Option (⌥) while right-clicking its dock icon to replace "Quit" with "Force Quit". This works in stock macOS — it's just not documented anywhere visible. Most users don't know it exists.

If the app is so frozen it won't respond to the right-click at all, you'll need to go to Apple menu → Force Quit (⌘⌥Esc) instead.

What's impossible with the native dock's right-click menus

Here's what macOS won't let you do from a dock right-click, regardless of which app it is:

• Switch Chrome, Brave, Edge, or Arc profiles directly from the dock
• Close a specific window without first clicking into it
• See a live preview of a window before you click it
• Access media controls for Spotify, Doppler, or any third-party player (only Apple Music gets this natively)
• Right-click a terminal app (iTerm2, Ghostty, Kitty) and get anything beyond the basic window list

For people who run a handful of Chrome profiles — a personal account, a work account, a client account — the lack of profile switching from the dock is a genuine daily friction. You have to click into Chrome, then use the profile picker at the top right, then navigate to wherever you were going.

How Dockish extends dock right-click menus

Dockish replaces the macOS dock entirely and brings substantially richer context menus with it. The difference is most visible in a few specific places:

Chrome, Brave, Edge, Vivaldi, Arc, and LibreWolf: right-clicking their dock icon in Dockish shows your profiles as direct menu items. One click opens a new window in that profile — no detour through the app UI required. This landed in version 1.1, shaped by user feedback shortly after launch.

Force Quit with Option: holding Option while right-clicking any app icon replaces Quit with Force Quit — same behaviour as macOS, but it works consistently across all apps in Dockish including ones where the native dock occasionally doesn't register the Option key correctly.

Media controls: Dockish surfaces playback controls (previous, play/pause, next) for a broader set of media apps than macOS does natively.

Terminals: iTerm2, Ghostty, and other terminal apps get proper right-click support including their session windows, rather than a generic fallback.

Close from hover previews: Dockish shows live window previews when you hover over a dock icon, and you can close individual windows directly from the preview without switching to that app first. That's separate from the right-click menu but solves the same frustration — getting to a specific window without clicking through all of them.

Dockish is $6.99 as a one-time purchase with a 7-day free trial, requires macOS 14 (Sonoma) or later, and keeps the overall dock experience familiar — it doesn't try to turn your Mac into a Windows taskbar.

If you just want the Force Quit shortcut

If the only thing you came here for is the Force Quit trick: hold Option while right-clicking any frozen app's dock icon in stock macOS. You'll see "Force Quit" instead of "Quit". No third-party app needed.

For everything else — profile switching, media controls, live window previews, closing windows without switching context — the native dock genuinely doesn't have it, and no amount of System Settings changes will add it.

Common questions

Can you add custom right-click menu items to the macOS dock?

No — macOS doesn't expose any official way to customise what appears in dock right-click menus. The options shown are determined entirely by the app itself and by macOS. Third-party dock replacements like Dockish can provide richer menus because they build the menu themselves rather than relying on the system.

Why doesn't Chrome show profiles in the macOS dock menu?

Chrome would need to implement this specifically for macOS using the dock's Dock Tile plugin API, and Google hasn't done it. The dock menu Chrome shows is generic — it lists open windows but has no awareness of profiles. Dockish builds the profile list by reading Chrome's local profile data directly, which is why it can show them.

Does holding Option when right-clicking work for all apps?

It works for most apps in the stock macOS dock — holding Option swaps "Quit" for "Force Quit". A small number of apps override the dock menu entirely and may not respond to this. If it doesn't work, use ⌘⌥Esc (Force Quit Applications window) as a reliable fallback.