James Thomson on the Origins of the macOS Dock | Hacker News Reader

James Thomson on the Origins of the macOS Dock

daringfireball.net

71 pointstosh54 comments

Links to https://tla.systems/blog/2025/01/04/i-live-my-life-a-quarter...

Which was discussed a few days ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42616699

We all know the correct dock location is LEFT, because there's fewer mouse movements to reach the dock apps and the close/minimize buttons of a window when using a mouse. No further arguments will be heard on this topic (:

the original default location in NeXTstep is on the right. i don't agree with the mouse argument because i don't need to constantly go there to access apps. i mean starting/switching apps is not the main activity on the computer. i want the dock visible but out of the way.

that said, reading the linked article it appears that the dock in OSX is not just a reskinned version of the NeXTstep dock, but written from scratch on MacOS9, and only then ported to OSX afterwards. i find that surprising.

either way, in MacOS, if I have an external monitor, choosing left or right(depending on the placement of the monitor) will mean I have go across my entire desktop to reach the dock. I can't have it on the edge of where the desktops are adjacent.

The correct dock location is hidden. What is this 'mouse' device that you refer to multiple times ? ;)

I like RIGHT, but we can all agree that BOTTOM is the worst, because it shortens your screen by about 15%!

No, we can't agree about that. I use sides for e.g. browser tabs or scroll bars or just plain window resizing etc, so if I had dock on the side then and extra mouse movement could trigger the dock instead of the desired UI element

> because it shortens your screen by about 15%!

it doesn't because it's hidden

You gotta auto hide dock no matter what side it goes or you’re giving up too much screen space. You know it’s there anyways, and it reappears immediately when you send your mouse to it. So the only thing it really tells you is what apps are running in the background, which honestly doesn’t justify taking up screen space on a laptop.

Plus, spotlight (or alternatives like Alfred/Raycast) are more convenient app launchers anyways. And switching apps is a bit better via cmd-tab, or better yet, raycast shortcuts or rcmd.

That's why I think GNOME made the right decision by hiding it.

Gnomes technically does not have a dock, though.

How is it not a dock? Yeah, you need to access it through the overview, but it still behaves like a dock.

Unfortunately, if you use a two-monitor setup, you cannot have the dock on the left of the right-hand-side monitor, or vice versa.

Left, hidden, as small as possible, with active app indicators turned off and nothing pinned to it. I'd get rid of it entirely if I could.

(Alfred, cmd+tab, cmd+` (and occasionally Exposé) are all I use to open and switch apps outside of the terminal.)

I used a command to make it always hidden, and I just reach it via Mission Control, been liking this setup a lot especially since i use Mission control extensivley via the trackpad

If you’re using the Dock in the first place, which you really shouldn’t because it’s a waste of screen space, and Exposé, Spotlight, and a decent Cmd+Tab replacement makes for a more better app/window management paradigm.

Obviously it should be on the left, because that's where it is on NEXTSTEP.

Deep down there it probably extends NSDock or something like that.

Dock on the left of primary display, only there so I can see notification badges on Slack / email / calendar, etc.

I almost never use the Dock. Cmd+Tab for app switching, Launchpad for launching. The Dock sure looks nice, and that animation was magical 20 years ago, but I hate how it interrupts the cleanliness of the desktop.

It's a severe case of form over function and the worst launcher-task manager of any current desktop GUI. The only worse one that I've personally experienced is Windows 3.1. (Early 2000s twm or fvwm or whatever don't count, right? They weren't even trying.)

I'm similar but I tend to use spotlight for launching. I do sometimes use the dock but all animations are disabled and it's hidden by default.

I want the NextStep style menus and shelf back. The dock sucks. :)

I genuinely never understood why nobody else implemented a version of the shelf from NextStep. It was such a fantastic UI innovation. In many ways NextStep was the pinnacle of desktop UI/UX design.

GNU/Linux and BSD had and still have WindowMaker and the whole Cocoa/OpenStep implementation with GNUStep.

I used WindowMaker for years and while it was pretty good, it was never as good as NextStep. GNUStep I could never really get to work consistently, it always felt more like an interesting proof of concept than a stable desktop environment.

Check NextSpace

Thanks! Will do.

I don’t even know what it does today I a multi monitor world. Not a good launcher, not a window switcher.

As a decade long windows and linux desktop user, the mac OS X dock was one thing I was really envy. There are tons of bad copies of it for various linux desktops (KDE, Gnome, XFCE, you name it), they all don't get it. The software quality of the dock and window manager was something where OS X was, for a long time, years apart other GUIs. My feeling is the default setting made the dock less exciting in the last years.

Why? It's restricted to one display, but will insist on moving from one to another if you make some moves with your cursor.

You can't decouple multiple windows of the same app.

IIRC it insists on disappearing if you are in fullscreen on another display.

It also wastes more space than other taskbars to be usefull and look decent.

(disclaimer: I dislike MacOS globally)

Sorry, but the Mac DE sucks compared to modern ones like KDE. Why does my left-aligned dock change width every time I open a new program? Now every window I maximize has a slightly different width depending on how many programs were opened when I maximized it. Why can't I disable this feature? Why can't I get the dock to fill the height of the screen?

Why are programs still "open" when they have no open windows? Why am I able to cmd-tab to applications with no open windows and have nothing happen?

This is a MacOS thing - an app is not just windows, it is also a menu. The windows can all be closed and the menu is still there. Apps that don't behave like that feel like they are not proper Mac apps. As a seasoned Mac user, cmd+Q is your friend.

>The windows can all be closed and the menu is still there.

I'm a few macOS versions behind what's current, so it's possible things have changed, but historically in OS X/macOS your description applied to apps that could have multiple windows. Any app that could only have one window—for example, System Preferences—would quit when the one window was closed.

Any App with a menu generally works as I described. And that hails back to the System 7 days, and also NextStep was the same from what I remember (though I mostly used OpenStep.)

System Preferences (especially the iOS-ified version) breaks a lot of rules. The "classic" version is really similar to the System Prefs in Next/OpenStep. The classic version was a single document interface, and it used a back arrow to go back a level. The new one has more persistence IIRC with the list down one side.

BTW, similar to DragThing, you can add a folder next to the trash can on the Dock. And to move a file to that folder, drop it there while holding CMD.

You don't need to hold command.

nice. Thanks

Because many people still don't know:

Set dock delay (when it's hidden and you move the mouse to the side of the screen) to instant:

> defaults write com.apple.Dock autohide-delay -float 0.0001; killall Dock

Undo:

> defaults delete com.apple.Dock autohide-delay; killall Dock

Who was the genius that invented the perma-jumping attention stealer dock effect?

"Jumping up and down like a Jack-Russel Terrier" as one commedian put it.

> James Thomson on the Origins of the macOS Dock

Looks like a polished copy from CDE.

(The site is horrible. White on light gray. I didn't expected this from a Mac developer).

I can only surmise you’re referring to Daring Fireball, not James’s blog. You might want to check your monitor’s color calibration (specifically its white point) or brightness setting. DF is and always has been white/light gray on dark gray. Specifically, it’s #fff (body text) or #ddd (blockquotes) on #4a525a.

And it's horrible. low-contrast, and a tiny unreadble font. Reading it on a M1 Mac

Why do you need any calibration to see that this is an awful color scheme?

Even black on white can be awful with disastrous calibration... white on #4A525A is almost white on black. It looks good on any of my screens and I don't even have that good calibration.

there is nothing "almost" about it, #4A525A is ~35 on a 100 lightness scale away from black, "almost" would be 5% or something

It’s still within contrast accessibility guidelines. I find it much more pleasing on the eyes than full black on white, which causes a lot of eyestrain on an emissive display like a monitor.

Minimum accessibility requirement doesn't define high quality and full black on white isn't the only alternative, so no need to limit your comparison to it

light grey? If 808080 is neutral mid grey, how can 4A525A (32% lightness) be anything but a dark grey? The contrast seems quite readable to me, and seems to pass guidelines: https://coolors.co/contrast-checker/ffffff-4a525a

Try the actual text color instead of fff (also in quotes, which take up most of the space)

The actual text color is either #fff or #ddd depending on if you’re talking about a blockquote. #fff gets full marks; #ddd gets a “good” rating.

no, it's #eee for the main text and #ddd for the quotes

And both are slightly above "minimum contrast", nothing good about it despite what the checker sites says

> it’s #eee

I’m going by reading the CSS.

> both are slightly above "minimum contrast"

That’s simply not true.

Try going by reading the actual page instead, or a web inspector can read CSS rules better than you, linkedlist overrides fff

I'm using Mac OS for 3 years now but still find KDE/Windows to be way better.

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