I have read several posts where some place the dock on the left or right side of the screen, rather than at the bottom. I have my dock set to auto-hide at the bottom. I seldom use it-I use search to launch applications. What is the advantage, if any, of having the dock to the left or right of the screen even if set to auto-hide?
I don’t think there’s an “advantage” to any placement. It’s just what feels natural. I’ve always kept my Mac doc on the left side because I like the bit of extra vertical height on windows, and I like dragging documents to the dock or dropping things on dock icons by dragging right-to-left because that feels natural to me. I also never auto hide the dock because I don’t like things automatically sliding in and out of view when I move the mouse.
But on Windows I always have the taskbar locked at the bottom of the screen. Go figure 
Your computer screen has more room horizontally than vertically. I also used software where I was constantly needing to put the cursor at bottom of screen so even if I hid the dock, it would pop up.
So I put my dock on the right and it has stayed there ever since.
I’ve tried both. I guess it comes down to what’s more important in your situation - more screen real estate, versus having less distance to move to reach it.
Mine is on the right. I used to use two external monitors, and it seemed natural for the main screen with desktop to be on the right, towards my clamshelled laptop which sits on the right. It’s also on the right, rather than bottom, so that there is more vertical room when using the laptop screen alone. Now that I use one external monitor, it still makes sense for the above reasons. I have it set to auto hide, as I don’t need to see it all the time to know it’s there (Object permanence 
).
The reason I have mine on the right goes back to how I arranged my Desktop before OS X.
In those days, the hard drive icon sat in the upper right corner. Below that, I had a single column of icons that consisted of aliases to my most frequently used applications and my most frequently used folders and files. That stretched all the way down to the bottom right corner, where the Trash sat. I can’t remember for sure, but knowing how meticulous I can be about such trivial things, I’m guessing I curated that column of icons to keep it from spilling over to the left to a second column.
With the Dock on the right, always set to its largest size, and with my Finder preferences set so that new windows open to the Home folder, I was able to largely re-create the arrangement I had grown accustomed to in ye olden tymes.
A secondary reason is that I like my windows to be as tall as possible, while I rarely run out of horizontal space. For me, there is almost always more than enough horizontal space and almost never enough vertical space.
I’d love to use auto hide, but when I slide over to make the Dock reappear, the delay is always just long enough to annoy me.
As mentioned earlier keeping the dock on the bottom eats up proportionally more vertical space (or when hidden then revealed gets in the way of top-to-bottom windows). And putting it on the right side gets in the way of files on the desktop.
So I have my dock on the left, with hiding turned on.
I tend to place apps there that I infrequently use but either forget the name of, lol, or want to remind myself to use. Otherwise I usually use Alfred to call up apps.
I keep mine on the side because of the additional horizontal real estate. Of course, if you hide your dock that’s not really a concern, but I don’t like hiding and I don’t like magnification because:
- I don’t want to wait for the dock to appear or disappear. I know the delay is short, but when the dock is visible, the delay is zero.
- I don’t like then things move around on me, such as when the dock appears or hides, or worse, when magnification is doing its thing. In both cases I find it’s unpleasant, and while hiding/showing the dock almost always behaves, it does appear sometimes when I don’t intend for it to, and it does hide sometimes when I want it to remain (because of my cursor position, of course, so not a bug). There’ sa level of precision (not a high level of precision, but precision nonetheless) that’s required to make it behave. An always-visible dock requires no precision.
But I love that these settings exist, that way we can all have things configured how we want!
I prefer my dock hidden because I want to focus on the app I"m working in. The dock is distracting to me. When I need it, I flick the cursor to the bottom.
I suspect preference is related to screen size. At 27” I enjoy the bottom position. Tried the others… hidden.
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