If you’re like most people, your Mac’s Dock is always open and ready to go. But if it starts to get stuck in a particular position, you can’t move it or resize it, and you can’t fix it yourself. That’s because your Dock is part of the Mac’s system—it’s not something that you can just fix or change. To fix your Dock, first try moving the Dock itself. If that doesn’t work, then try resetting your Mac. If that still doesn’t help, then you may need to take apart your Mac and fix its Dock specifically.
Sometimes, your Mac’s Dock might freeze up and stop working. It might also become glitchy, with app badges never going away or apps still showing after you close them. Here’s how to fix those problems.
The Simple Fix: Restart the Dock
Restarting the Dock will usually fix problems you’re having with it. You can do it in Terminal by typing (or copying and pasting) this command and then hitting Enter:
The Dock should restart itself automatically.
Note: If you don’t want to use the terminal, you can accomplish the same thing by restarting your system—it just takes more time.
The Slightly Less Simple Fix: Reset and Restart Your Dock
If you’ve restarted the Dock (or your Mac) and the Dock is still acting up, you can reset to the default Dock settings and restart the Dock. To to that, type (or copy and paste) the following command at the terminal and then hit Enter:
Keep in mind that this command does reset the dock back to its default settings, so you may have to fire up its preferences and reconfigure the Dock the way you had it, if you use different settings.
Sometimes the Dock Isn’t the Problem
Sometimes Finder itself can cause issues with the Dock. If you’ve tried our previous suggestions and your Dock is still acting up, you can restart Finder from the terminal by typing (or copying and pasting) the following command and hitting Return:
If you don’t want to use the terminal, you can also hold down the Option key, right-click the Finder icon, and then click the “Relaunch” command.
Force-quitting Finder will cause it to relaunch as well.
