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My Mac’s Dock disappeared. How to get it back

Start with Option Command D. If that does nothing, six causes in order of likelihood, from hidden to a damaged preference file. September 2026.

Try this first: press ⌥⌘D. That toggles auto-hide, and it brings back a Dock that is merely hidden rather than missing.

If that does nothing, work down this page. The causes go from most to least likely, and none of them involve reinstalling anything.

1. It is hidden, not gone

Auto-hide is a single keystroke away and is easy to turn on by accident. Push the pointer firmly into the bottom edge of the screen and hold it there for a second. If the Dock slides up, that is all this was.

defaults write com.apple.dock autohide -bool false; killall Dock

If the Dock takes an age to appear, the delay is set long rather than the Dock being broken:

defaults write com.apple.dock autohide-delay -float 0; killall Dock

2. It is on another screen

On a multi-monitor Mac the Dock belongs to one display at a time, and it moves when your pointer visits the bottom of another one. If you have just unplugged a monitor, the Dock may still consider the missing screen its home.

Move the pointer to the bottom of each screen in turn and hold. To bring it back permanently, push the pointer to the bottom of the display you want and leave it until the Dock arrives. More in keeping the Dock on one screen.

3. It is behind a full-screen app

A full-screen window hides the Dock by design. Press Esc or ⌃⌘F to leave full screen, or swipe to another Space. This one catches people out because the Dock is working perfectly, just not where they are looking.

4. The Dock process has stopped

The Dock is a program, and programs stop. macOS will restart it immediately if you ask:

killall Dock

Nothing is lost, no windows close, and your layout is untouched. It is safe to run at any time. If you get No matching processes, the Dock genuinely was not running and this command has just started it. Detail in what killall Dock does.

5. The icons are too small to see

A tilesize of 16 is a strip a few pixels tall at the bottom of the screen, easy to mistake for nothing at all. Put it back to something normal:

defaults write com.apple.dock tilesize -int 48; killall Dock

6. The preference file is damaged

If none of the above brings it back, the file macOS reads the Dock from is unreadable. Deleting it makes macOS build a clean one:

defaults delete com.apple.dock; killall Dock

This does throw your pinned apps away. It is the last step for a reason, but it is reliable, and the apps themselves are untouched, only the list of which ones sit in the Dock.

Still nothing?

At this point the Dock is not the problem. Restart the Mac, which rules out a stuck window server, and then log into a fresh user account from System Settings › Users & Groups. If the Dock is fine in the new account, the fault is in your account's preferences and step 6 will fix it. If it is missing there too, it is system level and worth talking to Apple about.

Common questions

Can I get my old Dock layout back after deleting the file?

Not from macOS. Nothing in the system records what your Dock looked like before, which is the gap that made us build Still Dock. If you have a Time Machine backup you can restore ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.dock.plist from before the problem.

Did an app delete my Dock?

It can happen. Cleaner utilities sometimes remove preference files they judge to be clutter. If the Dock reverts repeatedly, see why the Dock resets itself.

Is the Dock gone from the Finder too?

The Dock and the Finder are separate programs. If the Finder is also missing, restart the Mac before doing anything else here; that is a different fault.