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Before Big Sur, a hidden Dock (at the bottom of the screen) would be unhidden only if the mouse pointer was moved to the very bottom of the screen — you literally had to slam the mouse into that last row of pixels.

In Big Sur, there’s a wide “activation area”. The Dock unhides when the mouse pointer’s tail has only just disappeared off the bottom of the screen.

I spend a lot of time in JetBrains IDEs, which have a number of important controls in the status bar at the bottom. Working on Big Sur, the constant unwanted activation of the Dock has become a major irritation. My options are to work in a smaller window, giving up some screen real estate (but then why hide the Dock in the first place?) or to work in full screen mode (but I often need other applications open).

There are many lists of hidden Dock preferences available online, so I’m hoping that the width of this activation script might be configurable and not entirely hard-coded.

Edit: Using Apple's "Pixie" app from the "Additional Tools for Xcode" package, I've established that the Dock activates as soon as the point of the mouse cursor is in the bottom 20 rows of pixels.

Edit #2: In macOS 11.4, the size of the activation area has been significantly reduced. It's still more than a single pixel, but it's nowhere near as wide as before. Essentially, this is no longer the real problem it was before — to me, at least.

Edit #3: Playing with Pixie again, it seems to me that the dock now activates if the focus point of the pointer is in the bottom 4 pixel rows.

wjv
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    Not a solution but an idea: maybe move Dock to right or left. After all - screen is wider than higher and there should be more room for Dock 'real estate'. – Aivar Paalberg Jan 20 '21 at 08:52
  • @AivarPaalberg That is of course another option, and it might well be a solution for some. Personally, I have so much muscle memory using a bottom Dock, that I’d almost rather learn to live with a bigger activation area.

    But yes, you’re right to point that out as an option.

     – wjv Jan 20 '21 at 10:34
  • There are other options which may or may not be suitable: whatever you do with pointer in JetBrains IDE window footer - try to find keyboard shortcuts for said actions. In similar matter - whatever you do in Dock find out keyboard shortcut for these as well. I haven't used Dock for years and I don't miss a thing :-) and doing stuff from keyboard is generally considered more productive than mouse. – Aivar Paalberg Jan 20 '21 at 11:11
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    @AivarPaalberg While I obviously agree with using keyboard shortcuts in an IDE, it’s not a generic solution to this problem. For instance, when touching up some scanned photos in Pixelmator Pro, working in fullscreen (which is preferable when working with photos), I can’t bring use the repair tool at all near the very bottom of the photo. And in this case, we’re no longer in the realm of shortcuts. Yes, I can work in windowed mode instead, but “just don’t use the bottom of your display” is not a very satisfactory solution in the general case. :( – wjv Feb 01 '21 at 11:08
  • I'm having similar problems with horizontal scrollbars in design apps; I'm equally unkeen to switch to side dock as I'll run into the same issue unless I disable the show/hide, and then I lose screen real estate, although admittedly not that much. – Keith Fryer Feb 12 '21 at 15:20
  • On my Macbook the problem is even worse. The activation area for the dock is the entire area occupied by the dock when it is visible, which completely defeats the purpose of having the dock auto-hide. – Ryan C. Thompson Apr 04 '21 at 22:31
  • Wow, @RyanC.Thompson, that sounds really weird. I haven't heard of anyone having that experience before. Maybe it's time to go through some of the standard trouble-shooting motions, like creating a new account and seeing if the problem persists there? – wjv Apr 06 '21 at 07:58
  • @wjv Actually that problem went away after a reboot. Now I'm back down to just the regular oversized activation area described in the question. – Ryan C. Thompson Apr 06 '21 at 11:46
  • This doesn't answer the question but I don't have the issue as described in the original question at all so it's not universal to Big Sur. I've got the identical behaviour to macOS Catalina and prior, where the Dock doesn't show unless the mouse cursor is moved to and beyond the bottom of the screen. Have you tried with a new user account in case it's something strange with your setup? Does it only happen with certain apps? Office apps use their own windowing and so will likely cause strangeness to happen as it does elsewhere on macOS (and I don't have Office to try it myself). – grg Apr 06 '21 at 12:19
  • Haha that's so weird, @RyanC.Thompson. Well at least you've gone back from very broken to only somewhat broken! – wjv Apr 07 '21 at 12:20
  • That's very interesting, @grg! If the problem isn't universal, there may be hope (and it would explain why I don't hear about more people throwing their toys). I'm experiencing the issue on a new MacBook on which I installed Big Sur from scratch, so it wouldn't appear to be configuration-dependent, nor a hangover from some previous OS version. If I may ask: Has the Mac where you DON'T see the issue been upgraded from a previous OS? If so, that raises all sorts of questions! (To answer your question: This happens in all apps — or even if no apps are running — in both windowed and fullscreen.) – wjv Apr 07 '21 at 12:25

2 Answers2

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This is not a real answer. I am also frustrated by that behaviour but it seems like the scroll bar on some applications can and to avoid BigSur, has to be interacted with above where the actual scroll bar appears to be (ref grg's comment):

Big Sur has bad (too big) mouse box for reactive dock

Another none answer is to decrease the dock size to the smallest size so that most of the time it's not in the way:

Using a tiny Big Sur dock helps some of the time

** edit **

I've now moved to dock to the left and made the icons bigger again.

AJP
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  • As you said, not an answer, but still a good point! – wjv Jan 27 '21 at 07:23
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    One could also add that scrollbar issues make a Dock on the right-hand side of the screen almost impossible to use in Big Sur. Not many apps have horizontal scroll bars along the bottom, but a great many do have vertical scroll bars on the right. And whenever such an app is fullscreened, or even just on the right of the screen, using the scrollbar becomes nearly impossible due to Big Sur's large "activation area" if your Dock is on the right. – wjv Apr 06 '21 at 09:08
  • Great point, I hadn't even thought about that. One wonders if Apple testers even tried it out with the dock on the right, if their managers listened or if the product team responded... well actually we know the answer to that question. – AJP Apr 06 '21 at 10:12
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    "above where the actual scroll bar is" This is not what's happening here, you can't click on something your cursor isn't on! The actual cursor click location is a few pixels down from the very top of the cursor arrow, so your cursor is on the scroll bar even though it might not appear so if you're looking precisely at the top of the cursor. – grg Apr 06 '21 at 12:16
  • You are correct @grg . I have clarified that statement. – AJP Apr 08 '21 at 12:03
  • The cursor's hot-spot (to use Apple's terminology) is at the very tip of the black arrow. It is, however, not at the tip of the white border that surrounds the black arrow. At the tip, that is a difference of exactly 5 pixels (if one disregards how retina scaling plays havoc with pixel counts). – wjv Apr 09 '21 at 11:03
  • I use the Dock on the right: it's by far the best place for it. You don't need to move the pointer onto a scrollbar: scrolling is done with the trackpad, regardless of the pointer's position. Or use the Page keys. – benwiggy Jun 13 '21 at 18:03
  • This seems to've got suddenly worse after a minor Ventura update - or a least, is suddenly irritating to me when it hadn't been. I tried moving it to right, but now it's still activated from the bottom and disappears if you try to move the mouse to interact with it on the right... I sometimes use it to open 'Downloads', can probably live without... – PeterT Feb 09 '24 at 20:09
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Another potential "solution" is to set the auto-hide time to a large number... I chose 99999999 and instead use option+cmd+d to show the dock if you need it.

defaults write com.apple.dock autohide-delay -float 9999999; killall Dock

(To reset to default you can use: defaults delete com.apple.dock autohide-delay; killall Dock)

Link to comment under answer to different question: Is there a way to completely disable Dock?

AJP
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