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Comment by threads2 | Hacker News Reader

I set the Mac OS dock to auto-hide and it frees up, like, an inch of space. Blows me away when I see people with the default-sized dock always open. Any real reason for this?

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Because you have to mouse over, wait half a second, then find and click the app you're looking for? I'd rather trade screen real estate for time.

If you want to optimize for time, then use Alt+Tab to switch windows rather than clicking.

I forget the way to set it but you can make the delay down to 0 if you want. Lately I've been using Mission Control to switch to active ones and Launchpad for to switch to inactive ones though. Spotlight can be good too.

Huh?

Then forget about the Dock and use Spotlight, I launch whatever I need in less than a second.

I do the same as you on my work Mac Pro, with if pinned to the left of the screen. On the other hand, for my personal Air the screen size is small enough that having it hidden means I often accidentally hover over it. The constant unintentional popping-in becomes more frustrating than having the reduced screen space.

On the Air I only use max-size windows & on the Pro I use tiles and panes.

Auto-hide makes the edge a dead zone... Can't interact with things there because something might shift in and take the interaction. (Not that I like the Mac dock anyway, but the same principle applies to auto-hide in other settings as well).

You can set the dock size to be uselessly tiny so it’s basically invisible with auto-hide. It’s great, you have to really try hard to find it.

    defaults write com.apple.dock tilesize -integer 1; killall Dock.

Why do you have the icon size set so large? When I used a Mac I always kept the icons small and disabled auto-hide because I disliked how long it took for the bar to pop up.

It is way too slow by default, I set the delay and animation time to 0 so it pops up immediately.

  defaults write com.apple.dock autohide-delay -int 0
  defaults write com.apple.dock autohide-time-modifier -int 0
  killall Dock

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