As you all know, Dock icons can be removed by simply clicking them and dragging them out of the Dock. As soon as the “poof” animation appears, you can release the mouse button to remove the icon.
It seems like in Mountain Lion there is a bit of a delay plus a minimum distance required between when you start dragging and when the “poof” animation appears, i.e. when you can release the mouse button to remove the icon. If you release the mouse button before the “poof” animation appears, the icon won’t be deleted from the Dock. If you don’t drag the icon far enough away from the Dock, the “poof” animation won’t appear at all, and again the icon won’t be deleted from the Dock when you release the mouse button.
Is there a hidden setting (defaults write
-style) or some other way to disable this delay and/or minimum distance setting?
strings
cannot be used with Dock's executable. Even if there was a preference for it, it's unlikely to be discovered unless there's some other ways to search for hidden preferences that have been overlooked.strings Dock.app/Contents/MacOS/Dock
, but nothing useful there. Also, here's a very comprehensive list of defaults commands: github.com/mathiasbynens/dotfiles/blob/master/.osx but I couldn't find anything related to your question there.