The Jumping Panel
When you enable the “Automatically hide and show the Dock” option in macOS, the Dock slides off-screen to give you more desktop real estate. It reappears whenever you move the mouse cursor to the edge of the screen where the Dock is positioned (typically the bottom). While this auto-hide behaviour is generally desirable, the Dock’s reappearance is often triggered accidentally — you move the mouse to click a button near the bottom of a webpage, and the Dock surges upward, pushing your target out of reach. Full-screen video players, presentation tools, and design applications are particularly affected, as any cursor drift toward the screen edge summons the Dock and overlaps your content.
Controlling Dock Auto-Show Sensitivity
To stop macOS from automatically showing the Dock too eagerly when you hover near the screen edge, you can either increase the delay before the Dock appears or disable auto-hide entirely.
If you want to keep auto-hide but add a deliberate delay to prevent accidental triggers, open Terminal and run the following command: defaults write com.apple.dock autohide-delay -float 1.5. This sets a 1.5-second delay (adjustable to any value you prefer) before the Dock begins to slide out when the cursor reaches the edge. Follow this with killall Dock to restart the Dock and apply the change. You can also adjust the animation speed with defaults write com.apple.dock autohide-time-modifier -float 0.5 followed by another killall Dock. If you want to disable auto-hide entirely and keep the Dock permanently visible, open System Settings > Desktop & Dock and turn off the toggle labelled Automatically hide and show the Dock. To revert the delay to the default, run defaults delete com.apple.dock autohide-delay and killall Dock.