Is there a way to completely disable Dock?

Question

I want the Dock completely gone. I haven't used it in the past three releases of OS X (10.5 to present). I want it completely gone, and LaunchBar there instead. Is there a way to kill the Dock so that it does not load or run?

Answer 1

The Dock process on OS X is responsible for more than just the actual Dock on your screen. It does a bunch of background stuff, including Dashboard. Most notably, the Finder won't function properly if the Dock process isn't running, so turning it off completely is pretty much a no-go without breaking OS X in the process.

The best I can suggest is keeping the dock hidden, and make the size as small as possible so you're less likely to trigger it.

You can also position it where it's least likely to get in the way - as you probably know, you can put it on the left, right or bottom of your screen. But you can also pin it to a particular corner, just use the defaults write com.apple.dock pinning -string start command. Type that command in Terminal (replace start with end to change which corner it goes in, or middle to go back to the default), then killall Dock to restart the Dock and apply the change.

Answer 2

This article from Lifehacker.com.au suggests setting the dock autohide delay to 1000 seconds, like so:

defaults write com.apple.Dock autohide-delay -float 1000 && killall Dock

To restore the default behavior

defaults delete com.apple.Dock autohide-delay && killall Dock

The author says he sets the delay to two seconds, so he can still get to the dock in those rare cases when it's needed.