Hiding the system Dock

This is off by default.

Turning on Hide System Dock rewrites three com.apple.dock preferences and restarts the Dock.

Reserve Screen Space

Reserve Screen Space instead parks the Dock showing on the bar’s edge, at a tile size that makes its screen-space reservation match the bar exactly, with its launch and attention bounces turned off. The bar sits on top of it. The effect is that maximised windows stop short of the bar instead of running underneath it.

The Dock is covered rather than hidden because only a Dock that is showing holds a reservation every app respects: a hidden one gives its space back the next time an app launches or quits. Two things follow from it being really there. A translucent bar can let its icons show through faintly. And the option does nothing while the bar auto-hides, since a bar that slides away would uncover it.

It does not work inside a native full-screen space — macOS reserves nothing there except for the menu bar. Reserved-space mode covers maximised windows; for full-screen, the bar can only float over the window or get out of the way. Zoom windows instead of sending them full-screen if you never want the bar to overlap.

Your original settings

Your original values are captured to:

~/Library/Application Support/Eskele/dock-backup.json

…before anything is written, and restored when Eskele quits — including on SIGTERM, via atexit, and on the next launch if Eskele was SIGKILLed.

Restore System Dock on the menu bar item undoes it immediately, without quitting.

Restarting the Dock restarts more than the Dock

Mission Control, Launchpad and Stage Manager all live in the same process, so they restart with it.

If your Dock is ever left hidden

From the repository:

make restore-dock

Or, with Eskele deleted entirely:

defaults delete com.apple.dock autohide-delay; defaults write com.apple.dock autohide -bool false; killall Dock

A consequence worth knowing

Because Eskele restarts the Dock, a badge that was already standing when Eskele launched is gone from the new Dock’s tile until the application next changes it. This is what any killall Dock does, and nothing can ask an application to re-publish its badge. See Badges.

Why it can never be sandboxed

An application that controls the Dock cannot be sandboxed, and an application that is not sandboxed cannot ship on the Mac App Store. That is the trade, and it is not one Eskele can get out of.