Default Dock on Mac
With a new Mac you have a standard order of the app icons in the Dock. These are all apps created by Apple itself. The idea is that you immediately have an overview of all the possibilities that your Mac has, without having to search. The longer you use your Mac, the more apps you install and the more icons you may put in the Dock. You can drag them into any order you want, but if you want to go back to the original layout, you can do that too.
Default apps in your Mac Dock
The standard version of the dock always contains a number of important macOS applications, including Safari, Messages, App Store and System Settings. In addition, the programs that you received for free with your Mac also appear as standard: Pages, Numbers and Keynote. This standard dock gives a good overview of the possibilities your Mac has. For a complete overview of standard Mac software, we have a separate article.
Of course you can manually put all those icons back in the dock, but we take an easier approach. Read on to find out how.
Restore Mac Dock to original layout
There is a simple command you can give to your Mac to set the Dock back to default. Complete the following steps:
- Open the Terminal program.
- Complete the following Terminal command literally as it appears. Don’t make any typos, otherwise it won’t work:
defaults delete com.apple.dock; killall Dock - Then press the Enter key. Now all icons of the default dock are re-placed.
- If necessary, remove the icons that you no longer want to use.
If you no longer have Pages, Numbers, and/or Keynote on your Mac, question marks will appear where those apps should have been in the Dock. It is useful to remove it immediately. Please note that this command also resets your interactive corners. You therefore have to reset the options for the interactive corners.
What we also think is a useful tip is to clean up the Dock by only showing active apps.
More tips for your Mac dock:
- Here’s how to place a website shortcut in your Mac’s dock
- This is how you remove the Siri icon from your Mac’s menu bar and dock
View our complete overview of Mac tips. With hundreds of tips for Mac, we cover almost every setting and possibility!
