I have a love/hate relationship with the Mac OS X Dock. I’m sure I’m not alone. The Dock has been around since the very first OS X version, and continues to be both marginally functional and frustratingly useless. I keep mine empty of non-running apps, but use it often for opening documents via drag-and-drop. It’s also nice for badge notifications and remains the only way to (easily) view what’s in Trash. So, like I said, love/hate.
I’ve flirted with just about every Dock arrangement there is: right, left, bottom (even top). I’ve pinned it to the start and end for every side. I’ve used it with auto-hide enabled and not. For the most part, I’ve enjoyed it on the right and pinned to the end (so, bottom-right), and shown all the time. Lately, though, I’ve found myself enabling auto-hide so the Dock stays tucked away, out of view. The one thing that bothers me about this setup is the animation speed when it appears and hides. Well, with a little terminal command, my problem was solved. And now, I shall share with you.
To speed up the Dock show/hide animation, use this command in terminal:
defaults write com.apple.dock autohide-time-modifier -float 0.5;killall Dock
You can set the timing to anything you want, even zero to disable the animation completely; default is 1. I tried 0.25 and felt it was almost too fast and didn’t feel right. Your mileage may vary.
(Original credit: Marius Butuc.)