I use multiple monitors, my dock used to swich between the active monitors. It now just stays locked onto one monitor and will not change. It is very irritating that the dock will not switch back and forth between active monitors that I'm working on. No matter what I do I can not get my dock to switch between screens anymore.
[Edited by Moderator]
MacBook Air 15″, macOS 15.3
Are you sure you don't use any apps that locks the dock position?
The dock is positioned at the bottom. I have 2 external displays sitting beside each other and my MacBook is open to the right of both of those. The dock used to pop up on whatever monitor I was on if I drug the cursor to the bottom of the screen. Now it is just fixed on one monitor and will not move no matter what I do.
Is the Dock always visible or it is hiding automatically?
It should not make a difference, but if it is always visible, try turning on the auto-hiding. Does it then make the Dock reappear on another screen as would be expected, or does it still only appear on the same screen always?
The dock is visible. I tried changing the setting to hide it already but it still didn't make a difference which way that setting was on. I also tried toggling on and off the setting that Displays have separate Spaces but that didn't make a difference either.
"Displays have separate Spaces" must be ON in order for the Dock to move.
And if you change this setting, you will need to restart your mac for the change to take effect.
You can easily see if it is on or not: when it is on, you have menu bars on all displays; when it's off, only the "main" display has a menu bar.
As a test, create a new user, login as that user - does the Dock behave properly (I suspect the answer is yes).
If that is the case, then maybe deleting the plist for the Dock can help.
This can be done by a few lines in Terminal.
You'd have to repopulate the Dock with the apps you want there, but that should not be too much trouble if it regains the functionality that you are missing.
You can set the plist aside, so in case the procedure does not fix things (which I expect it will), you can just put it back.
1) In Finder, press Command-Shift-G and paste
~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.dock.plist
2) Drag the file out of the folder and park it on the Desktop, for example. This way you can put the file back if this does not work
3) In Terminal, paste the following
killall Dock
4) The Dock should appear at the bottom of the main screen, with default apps
5) Test to see if the Dock now moves (I am confident that it will)
6) Populate the Dock with the apps you want and remove those you don't; adjust the settings the way you want in System Settings->Desktop & Dock
If you can't move the dock to another display by hovering the bottom of the target screen, there are only a few things possible:
1) Your Mac is running a third-party app to replace the Dock (just disable it)
2) Your Mac is running an app like DockLock Lite to lock the Dock position (just turn it off)
3) It is macOS bug and after update it may fix itself
Where is the Dock positioned (bottom, left or right), and how are the displays positioned relative to each other (side by side, one atop of the other?)
I've installed no new apps in forever. I'm more inclined to believe it's an Apple issue as it only started recently after an OSX upgrade but have no way of proving it.
Correct. And it is (and was) on. I tried turning it off, restarting and turning it back on and restarting but had not affect.
Unfortunately, no. It blew the dock away and replaced it with the standard dock but still will not switch monitors.
Dock not switching between active monitors on Mac with multiple displays