Changes to Dock Don’t Stick, Updates Revert Back at Startup or Login
Reading Time: 3 minutes The Dock on your Mac enables you to interact with your Mac. It is a convenient place to access apps. You can use the Dock in a number of ways:
- To open items, such as files, folders or apps.
- To quit or force-quit an app.
- To switch to the previous app.
- To display an app’s shortcut menu.
You can customize your Dock. You can add, remove or rearrange items. You can also change the appearance of it to your liking. Some users have said that when they customize and make changes to the Dock, all of the changes disappear as soon as they restart their Mac or when they log out. It seems that the Dock settings are not being saved after changes have been made. For example, you may add or remove an item from the Dock, only to have it set back to its previous state the next time you log into your Mac. This article will explain how you can fix things if you are experiencing this problem.
Try resetting the Dock preferences
It is possible that the Dock preference files are corrupted and causing this issue. To fix this, you may need to delete the Dock preference file. Here is how:
- Open Finder.
- From the Menu bar, select Go.
- This will open a drop-down menu. Select Go to Folder.
- In the field, copy and paste the following file path and hit enter:
~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.dock.plist- Now you will see that the Dock preference file has been found and selected. Drag it to somewhere like your Desktop. We will keep it there as a backup. If you are not happy with the result, you can then put it back later. If you do not want a backup, you can simply delete it or move it to the Trash. We are removing (or deleting) this file, but do not worry, macOS will automatically create a new one; however, all of your Dock settings and customizations will be gone, and everything will be restored to their original state.
- After dragging the preference file to the Desktop (or just deleting it), restart your Mac. Check to see if your problem continues by making a change or two to the Dock and then logging out and back in or restarting.
You may also want to check out our previous articles on the Dock included below.
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