How to lock the Dock on macOS 26

Short answer: the same four commands still work on macOS 26. Nothing about locking the Dock changed.

What did change is where the settings live in System Settings, which is why older guides send you to a pane that no longer exists.

The commands, unchanged

defaults write com.apple.dock size-immutable -bool true
defaults write com.apple.dock position-immutable -bool true
defaults write com.apple.dock contents-immutable -bool true
defaults write com.apple.dock autohide-immutable -bool true
killall Dock

These four keys have worked for over fifteen years and macOS 26 does not touch them. Swap true for false to release any one of them. Our free command generator writes the exact set for whichever locks you want, with the undo commands alongside.

Where the Dock settings moved

The old System Preferences pane called "Dock & Menu Bar" is gone. On macOS 26 the Dock lives in System Settings › Desktop & Dock, and the controls you will care about are at the very top: size, magnification, position on screen, and automatically hide and show.

This matters for one reason: once you run the commands above, those exact controls stop responding. That is the lock working, not a bug, and it is the thing people search for months later having forgotten they did it. See why the Dock settings are grayed out.

What genuinely is different

The settings pane is renamed and reorganized. Desktop & Dock, not Dock & Menu Bar.
Control Center is a real destination. Utilities can put toggles there now, which is a better place for something you flip occasionally than a menu bar that is already full.
Desktop widgets sit on the desktop proper. Worth knowing, because a widget that looks fine in the gallery can render as an empty block on the desktop if it was not built for it.
The multi-monitor behavior is untouched. The Dock still follows your pointer to the bottom of another display, and there is still no setting for it.

What has not changed, despite what you will read

Three claims turn up in macOS 26 articles that were not true in earlier versions and are still not true:

There is no top orientation. orientation accepts left, bottom and right. It has never accepted top.
There is no symbolic hotkey for the app switcher. Every defaults write com.apple.symbolichotkeys recipe for disabling ⌘Tab edits nothing, because the switcher is not in that list. We checked: 23 hotkeys are defined and none of them use keycode 48. See disabling ⌘Tab.
There is no supported key that pins the Dock to a display. If a guide gives you one, it does nothing.

Does this need permissions?

The commands do not. They write your own preferences and restart your own Dock, and no Accessibility or Full Disk Access prompt appears. Do not use sudo with them; these are per user settings and running them as root writes to the wrong account.

Common questions

Will these survive the next macOS update?

Yes. They are user preferences, not system files, so an update leaves them alone. They survive Migration Assistant to a new Mac too.

Do the locks work on Apple silicon and Intel?

Both. This is a preferences mechanism, not a binary, so the architecture is irrelevant.

Which macOS does Still Dock need?

macOS 13 or later, on Apple silicon. Most of our testing is on macOS 26.

If you would rather not keep a list of commands, Still Dock is the same four settings as switches, and it remembers the Dock you had before you locked it. The size lock is free.