On my desk, my Macbook lid is opened and positioned directly below my ultrawide external display. When connected, macOS correctly assigns the external display as “main” but I have to manually move the dock to the bottom of the display.
Whenever my Macbook wakes from sleep while connected or I disconnect/reconnect the external display, the dock moves from the bottom of the external display to the bottom of the built-in display. This happens 20+ times each day and gets annoying.
I’ve been researching a way using tools like Keyboard Maestro, Automator, or shortcuts to automate moving the dock to the bottom of the external display when that display is connected, but I haven’t found anything that works. There are plenty of work-arounds, but I’m not interested in work-arounds or alternatives. I definitely don’t want to arrange the displays in settings differently than their physical arrangement.
Am I chasing a white whale here? Or is there a way to make the dock automatically behave the way I want it to?
I think it is “working as intended”. It will only show the dock on one display at a time, if it only sees a single display (such as when waking up) it shows the dock on that. Moving the cursor to the very bottom of a display moves the dock to that display as long as it doesn’t abut another display.
Yep that’s correct. It’s the lag between the waking of the laptop and the external monitor. I have the exact same problem as the original poster and I am yet to find an automated solution either.
Yep. From what I have read, the Dock only understands left, right, and bottom positions. And bottom means the bottom of the bottom display . I list stepped away from my employer’s Macbook to take a break.
I’m sure that when I return and wake up the Mac ,
the dock will be back on the bottom display.
I have a Mac Studio, and four monitors, one of which is shared with my work laptop. Thus while not the same as with a laptop, my configuration does change.
And my dock stays put on the monitor I deem to be the primary. Even though that monitor is not the bottom most.
Thus I suspect bottom means “bottom of primary monitor”. And that your issue has to do with external versus internal monitors, not monitor position. As a test, set the configuration so that the laptop monitor is above the external monitor and see what happens upon awaking from sleep.
