Dock Disappeared on Mac? 6 Ways to Get It Back

A missing Dock is almost never broken — it's hiding, on another screen, or its process has stalled. Work through these six fixes in order; the first two solve it for most people in under ten seconds.

1–2: Auto-hide is the usual suspect

Fix 1 — push the pointer at the edge. Move your cursor to the very edge of the screen where the Dock lives (bottom by default, or left/right if you moved it) and hold it there for a beat. If auto-hide is on, the Dock slides out. It hides again when you move away — that's the feature working as designed.

Fix 2 — toggle auto-hide off. Press Cmd+Option+D. This keyboard shortcut flips Dock auto-hiding on and off instantly, and it's easy to hit by accident — which is how many "my Dock vanished" mysteries begin. You can also change it in System Settings → Desktop & Dock → Automatically hide and show the Dock.

3: You're in full screen mode

When any app is in full screen, macOS hides the Dock (and the menu bar) by design. Move the pointer to the Dock's edge of the screen and pause — it slides in temporarily. To get it back permanently, leave full screen: press Esc in most apps, or move the pointer to the top of the screen and click the green button. There is no setting that pins the Dock inside full screen; if you need it visible constantly, use a maximized window instead — see showing the Dock in full screen.

4: Restart the Dock process

The Dock is an ordinary process, and like any process it can hang — usually taking hover, bounce, and auto-hide animations with it. Restarting it is instant and completely safe: your layout, pinned apps, and running apps are untouched.

# relaunch the Dock (it restarts automatically)
killall Dock

The screen flickers for a second and the Dock reappears. No undo is needed — this only restarts the process, it changes no settings.

5: It moved to another display

With multiple monitors, the Dock lives on whichever display you last "summoned" it to — pushing the pointer past the bottom edge of any screen pulls the Dock over to that display. If your Dock is missing, check the bottom of your other monitor. To bring it home, move the pointer to the bottom edge of the display where you want it and keep pushing down for a moment.

6: Reset the Dock's preferences (last resort)

If the Dock still won't appear, its preference file may be corrupted. Deleting it rebuilds the Dock at factory defaults:

# WARNING: resets Dock layout, size, and pinned apps to defaults
defaults delete com.apple.dock
killall Dock

There is no undo for this one — your pinned apps and Dock settings are cleared, so take a screenshot of your Dock first and re-pin afterwards. It's the sledgehammer, but it reliably fixes a Dock that refuses to draw.

Dock visible but frozen instead?

A Dock that's on screen but ignores clicks is a different problem with a different fix order — start with the hung app, not the Dock. See how to fix a frozen or unresponsive Dock.