How to Permanently Stop Dock Icons from Bouncing.
The docking station is an easy way to access the applications and utilities available on your Mac. It’s dynamic and interactive, meaning that if an app wants to grab your attention, it can bounce to grab your attention. This works great for some apps, but you don’t want every app to keep bouncing and distracting you from what you are doing.
Luckily, you can stop the bouncing dock icons on your Mac by including a persistent method to help you get rid of this annoying behavior. But there are actually several ways to prevent Dock icons from bouncing.
Turn off symbol echoing in dock using System Preferences
One of the easiest ways to keep yourself from being constantly distracted by bouncing dock icons is to turn off the icon bouncing option in the System Preferences panel on your Mac. When it’s disabled, your icons will no longer animate.
- Click on the Apple logo in the upper-left corner of the screen and select the option labeled “System Preferences.”
- When the preferences panel opens, find the option labeled Dock and click it to open it. The dock settings menu will open.
- On the next screen, you will find several options that allow you to customize the behavior of the dock. You need to find an option that says Animate opens applications and unchecks the box. This will disable this feature.
- Although you have disabled the dock animation feature, it will most likely not work as the dock needs to be restarted. To do this, open a terminal window and run the following command in it.
killall Dock;
The dock will restart and your app icons will no longer bounce.
Turn off icon echoing in the Dock on Mac using Terminal
Apparently, some apps don’t follow your Mac’s directions and they still bounce regardless of the changes you make on the Mac.
If disabling the animation function didn’t work for you and the app icons continue to bother you, you might want to kill them for good. There is a Terminal command that will allow you to do this.
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- Launch Terminal in any way you like on your Mac.
- Type the following command in the Terminal window and press Enter. This will disable bouncing of icons in the dock.
by default write com.apple.dock no-bouncing -bool TRUE;
- You need to restart the Dock for the changes to be visible. To do this, enter the following command in the Terminal window and press Enter.
killall Dock;
- From now on, your Dock icons will never bounce – no matter what. Your Mac told them sternly not to move even a little.
In the future, if you ever want to return icons to their default behavior, that is, to allow them to bounce, you can do so by running the following command in the Terminal application on your Mac.
by default write com.apple.dock no-bouncing -bool FALSE;
After executing the command, the icons will return to the action.
Get rid of bounced docking codes from your vision
One of the reasons you notice icons bouncing in the Dock is because they are large enough to be visible. If you could somehow resize their icons, you wouldn’t see them.
Your Mac allows you to set your own size for the icons in the dock, and you can reduce the size of the icons so they don’t annoy you anymore.
Use system preferences to reduce the size of dock icons
This method allows you to reduce the size, but only to the minimum size allowed. For more flexibility, use the second method below.
- Click the Apple logo at the top and choose System Preferences.
- Click “Dock” to open the dock settings.
- Drag the Size slider all the way to the left and it will reduce the size of your Dock icons.
Changes are made instantly, and you can see them by hovering over the bottom of your Mac screen. To undo the effect, simply drag the slider to the right and this will increase the size of your icons.
Use the terminal to reduce the size of the icons in the dock
Terminal can reduce the size of your icons to 1 pixel so they are barely visible.
- Launch Terminal on your Mac.
- Type the following command and press Enter.
by default we write com.apple.dock tileize -float 1;
killall Dock;
If you ever want to revert the icons to their original size, replace 1 with 64 in the above command and run it.
Hide the Dock on Your Mac
The dock is not unique, and many of its features are available to other tools on your Mac. For example, you can use Launchpad to access your apps instead of the Dock, and so on.
In this case, you can hide the Dock and it will help you get rid of the bouncing Dock icons.
- Click the Apple logo at the top and choose System Preferences.
- Select “Dock” on the next screen.
- Turn on Auto Hide and Show Dock
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