How to hide and unhide the Dock on Mac

There are times when you don’t want the dock to show up screen when not in use. For example when taking screenshot on Mac you may want to auto hide the dock so that it doesn’t appear in your screenshot. Here we will see couple of ways to auto hide the dock, this way the dock will be hidden until you move the pointer to the dock area.

I have also covered how to unhide the dock and make it always show up on Mac, for those who have auto hide the dock by mistake.

1) From System Preferences

Open System Preferences though apple menu (It is the first drop-down item on the left hand side of the top menu bar) and click on Dock.
From this screen you can customize several options for your dock. To auto hide the dock, check the option that says “Automatically hide and show the Dock“.

For those who are wondering why their dock keep disappearing, you have to uncheck this option. This will make the dock to always show on screen.

2) Keyboard shortcut: Command + Option + D

You can auto hide or unhide the dock by pressing this key combination. Press Command + Option + D. This shortcut make this feature on or off, if you have auto hide enabled this shortcut will turn off the auto hide and if you don’t have the option enabled then this will enable it.

3) Control – click on dock separator

Press and hold Control key and click on dock separator, this will open up a menu, click on “Turn Hiding On“. If you already have auto hide enabled, you would instead see “Turn hiding off” option here.