To make the Dock disappear again, simply move the cursor away from the bottom of the Mac screen. To make the Dock appear, simply hover the mouse cursor over the bottom of the screen. When this box is checked, the dock will automatically hide itself when it’s not in use.

Showing the Dock When It’s Hidden, and Hiding The Dock When It’s Visible The setting exists in all versions of Mac OS X whether they are new or old, but you may find the toggle in System Preferences looks very slightly different in past versions of Mac OS X, mostly because there are less options available to customize the Dock experience in general: If the setting is unchecked, the Dock will always be visible at the bottom of the Mac screen. If the setting is checked, the Dock will hide and show itself automatically when the cursor is near the bottom of the screen.

Check the box for “Automatically hide and show the Dock” by clicking the checkbox next to it.

Open System Preferences from the  Apple menu and choose “Dock”.

For most Mac users, the System Preferences method is preferred: You can set the Dock to automatically hide itself when it’s not being used by either hitting the key shortcut as mentioned above, or by enabling the option in the Dock Preference panel. The keyboard shortcut effectively toggles the auto-hide feature on or off without going into the System Preferences, which we’ll cover next: How to Automatically Hide the Dock When Not in Use on Mac If you choose to hide it this way, it will reappear back if you hover over the region that you have your Dock placed with the mouse cursor.

If you hit Command+Option+D it will automatically hide or show the Dock in Mac OS X. How to Hide and Show the Dock with a Keyboard Shortcut This is easy to configure, either with a keyboard shortcut or by visiting the Mac OS X system preference settings, let’s get to it cover both. When the automatically hide feature is on, the Dock only shows itself when a cursor is placed over the region of the Mac screen where the Dock is displayed.

A simple trick to improve Dock functionality is hide it when the Dock is not actively in use.

How to hide mac dock bar