God, Apple, sometimes you make it so hard to love you. And you won’t have things like the 1Password updater stuck there (see my first screenshot) or two instances of TeamViewer (see my third). Then your Dock will once again be a place of sanity. Either way, you’ll deselect “Show recent applications in Dock” when you get there. If you pick “Dock Preferences” from that contextual menu, you’ll be taken to the same place. Now matter how much you customize your OS X Dock with new icons and whatnot, the thing is, after a certain amount of time, you’d prefer to go back to the stock settings, or how things were when. Complete details on this can be found right here. To do so, either click on the Apple Menu at the upper-left corner of your screen, choose “System Preferences,” and then click on “Dock,” or right- or Control-click on one of those aforementioned lines on the Dock itself: Here’s how to reset your Mac OS X Dock to its default settings and app layout in a few easy steps. In any case, if you’re an old fart like me, you can change this Dock behavior back to the way it worked under High Sierra (and earlier). Or maybe it’s just that I’m an old fart who doesn’t like change. The Dock Preferences pane of the Systems Preferences window on your MacBook gives you the opportunity to customize that quick-access strip for applications. But I find this annoying as all get-out! I like to control my Dock myself, darnit, and when it switches up on me without my say-so, I find it disconcerting.

On the surface, this is kind of cool, especially for the less tech-savvy folk who may not know how to find a program if it’s missing from the Dock. But now you’ve got two lines, and the space in the middle of them is taken up by recent apps these are programs that you’ve launched recently but haven’t specifically chosen to keep in your Dock. More macOS and App defaults from Mathias Bynens sudo - Execute a command as another user. In Expose, only show windows from the current space: defaults write wvous-show-windows-in-other-spaces -bool FALSE. If you just installed macOS Mojave, then you may have noticed that your Dock became a little bit more complicated:īefore Mojave, you had one dividing line there, which separated apps (on the left) from folders, files, minimized windows, and the trash (on the right). defaults write mcx-expose-disabled -boolean.

Mac os dock settings