The bar at the bottom of a MacBook screen is the Dock, and here is how to shrink or hide it

On a 13 inch laptop the strip of icons across the bottom of the screen is not a small detail. It sits in front of documents, it pushes window content up, and on a screen that is already short it takes a visible slice of the height that text needs. The strip is the Dock, and almost everything about it can be changed, including whether it is on screen at all.

What follows is what each control actually does, in the order that gives back the most space for the least disruption.

What the strip at the bottom is doing there

The Dock holds icons that point at apps, files, and folders, and it reports which apps are running with a small dot under the icon.

The Dock on the Mac desktop is a convenient place to access apps and features that you're likely to use every day, for example, Safari and the Trash. The Dock can show up to three recently used apps that aren't already in it and a folder for items you download from the internet. Source: support.apple.com, read September 23, 2026

Two parts of that description explain why the Dock never seems to stay the same width. It adds up to three recently used apps that were not pinned, and it keeps a Downloads folder at the far end. Both are settings rather than fixed behaviour.

The Dock is divided by thin separator lines. Apps live on one side, files and folders on the other, and the recently used apps sit in their own section. Those separators are not only visual: one of them is a control.

Shrinking it in two seconds, without settings

The fastest size change needs no settings pane at all.

Tip: To quickly adjust the Dock's size, move the pointer over the separator line in the Dock until a double arrow appears, then click and drag the pointer down or up. You can Control-click the separator to access other actions from the shortcut menu. Source: support.apple.com, read September 23, 2026

Dragging down shrinks the Dock, dragging up grows it, and the whole strip resizes live. Control-clicking that same separator opens a shortcut menu with the position and hiding options, which is the quickest route to them from the desktop.

The permanent version of the same control is in System Settings under Desktop & Dock. Size is the slider that decides how much height the strip takes, and Magnification decides whether icons grow under the pointer. On a small screen, a small Dock with Magnification turned on is the combination that gives back the most height while keeping icons easy to hit.

Hiding it completely

Two controls make the Dock disappear until it is wanted.

In Desktop & Dock settings, Automatically hide and show the Dock is described plainly: "Hide the Dock when you're not using it. To show the hidden Dock, move the pointer to the edge of the screen where the Dock is located." The Dock then slides in when the pointer reaches the bottom edge and slides out again when it leaves.

The keyboard equivalent toggles the same setting instantly.

Option-Command-D: Show or hide the Dock. Source: support.apple.com, read September 23, 2026

Auto-hide has one cost worth knowing about in advance. Anything else that lives near the bottom edge of the screen becomes harder to reach, because moving the pointer there summons the Dock over it. That includes a scroll bar at the bottom of a wide spreadsheet and any hot corner assigned to a bottom corner. Moving the Dock to the left or right edge avoids the conflict entirely while keeping auto-hide switched on.

Keyboard access still works when the Dock is hidden. Fn-Control-F3 moves focus into it, arrow keys move between icons, and Return opens the highlighted one, so hiding the Dock does not mean losing the ability to launch from it.

Moving it off the bottom edge

On a laptop this is usually the better change, because height is the scarce dimension and width is not.

Dock position on screen offers the left, bottom, or right edge. Moving it to the left gives every window the full height between the menu bar and the bottom of the screen, and the Dock then occupies width that most documents were not using anyway.

The setting interacts with one other thing. Double-clicking a window's title bar can be set to Fill, which Apple describes as expanding "a window to fill the space between the menu bar and the Dock." When the Dock is along a side, the same action fills the height and stops beside the Dock instead. On a short screen that is a meaningful difference in how much of a page is visible.

Making it stop changing shape

A Dock that shifts during the day is harder to use than a large one, because muscle memory stops working when icon positions move. Three settings control that.

Show suggested and recent apps in Dock is the main culprit, adding up to three apps that were opened recently and are not pinned. Turning it off means the Dock contains only what was deliberately put there.

Minimize windows into application icon changes where a minimised window goes. With it on, the window folds into the app's own icon and the Dock stays the same width. With it off, every minimised window gets its own thumbnail in the Dock, which is useful for finding windows and is also the fastest way to make the strip grow uncontrollably.

Show indicators for open applications adds the dot under running apps. It costs nothing in width and it is the only thing in the Dock that reports state, so it is worth keeping on.

Pinning and unpinning is done by dragging, and one detail saves confusion. Dragging an icon out of the Dock removes only the alias, not the app. If an app icon is removed by accident, opening the app brings the icon back, and Control-clicking it then choosing Options and Keep in Dock pins it again.

What the marks on the icons mean

Before removing anything, it helps to know which parts of the Dock are reporting something rather than just sitting there.

A dot under an icon means the app is running. A red badge means something is waiting: Apple describes it as an indication that "you need to take one or more actions in an app or System Settings," which is why a badge can appear on System Settings itself when an update is pending.

An icon that appears near the right end without being installed there is Handoff. Apple's description is specific: "the Handoff icon of the app you're using on your iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, or Apple Watch appears near the right end of the Dock." It comes and goes with whatever is open on a nearby device, so it is not something to hunt for in settings.

The folder at the far end is Downloads, and it is a stack rather than a plain folder. Control-clicking it offers different ways to sort and display its contents, which is worth two seconds for anyone who downloads a lot of files.

On a second display the Dock follows one setting

Anyone using a MacBook with an external monitor eventually asks why the Dock is on the wrong screen. The answer is not a Dock setting at all, it is in the Mission Control section of the same pane.

Displays have separate Spaces decides it. Apple states the consequence directly: "When this option is turned on, the Dock is available on all displays; when it's turned off, the Dock appears only on the main display." With it on, the Dock moves to whichever display the pointer was last pushed toward. With it off, there is one Dock on the main display and one menu bar to match.

The same setting is required for using apps in Split View on a secondary display and for Stage Manager, so turning it off to get a single Dock has consequences elsewhere. Changing it requires logging out and back in before the new behaviour appears, which is the step most people miss when they flip it and conclude that nothing happened.

There is also a way to keep windows off the Dock entirely rather than minimising them into it. Command-H hides the windows of the front app, and Option-Command-H hides every app except the one in front. Option-clicking a Dock icon does the same thing while switching, and Option-Command-clicking one switches to that app and hides everything else. For a laptop screen, hiding is usually better than minimising, because nothing accumulates in the strip at the bottom.

The other bar is the one that fills up

Anyone who has just reclaimed height at the bottom of the screen usually looks at the top next, and the strip up there behaves in the opposite way.

The Dock degrades gracefully. Add fifty icons and it shrinks them all, and everything stays clickable. The menu bar does not do that. Its right half holds the status icons belonging to background utilities, and past a certain width the leftmost ones stop being drawn at all.

Because there is limited space in which to display status items, status items are not guaranteed to be available at all times. For this reason, do not rely on them being available and always provide a user preference for hiding your application's status items to free up space in the menu bar. Source: developer.apple.com, read September 23, 2026

On a MacBook the notch takes a block out of the middle of that strip, so the point of failure arrives sooner than on a desktop display. macOS 27 added a rescue for it.

With macOS Golden Gate, Apple has added an overflow control in the form of a double arrow that appears when the notch or menu system is covering menu bar items. Source: macstories.net, read September 23, 2026

The top strip also has its own hiding control, in System Settings under Menu Bar, with four choices rather than a checkbox: Always, On Desktop Only, In Full Screen Only, and Never. In Full Screen Only is the setting that keeps the menu bar available on the desktop while getting it out of the way when a window fills the screen.

Where the two bars differ is in what happens after hiding. A hidden Dock gives back everything it held the moment the pointer reaches the edge. A menu bar with too many icons loses some of them whether it is hidden or not, which is a capacity problem rather than a visibility one, and it needs a tool that hides menu bar icons on a Mac rather than a setting. The feature comparison is the place to check which of those tools keep hidden icons clickable while the strip stays collapsed.

What to change first

Drag the Dock separator downward until the strip is about half its original height, then turn on Automatically hide and show the Dock and move Dock position on screen to the left edge. That returns the full height of the screen to whatever is being read or written. If the top of the screen is the part that is overcrowded, Koffret handles the strip that the Dock settings cannot reach.