DockWizard

A macOS Dock manager with portable presets, a GUI for bulk editing, and a CLI for scripting.

Save your Dock as a JSON file, keep it in your dotfiles, and put it back on any Mac. Apps that aren't installed on the new machine are reported rather than silently mangling the layout.

• Presets — capture the Dock to versioned JSON and apply it back, tiles and appearance.
• Bulk editing — multi-select, drag to reorder a whole block, wrap a run of apps in spacers, extract a selection into a new preset.
• Staged edits — nothing touches the Dock until you press Apply, because every write restarts the Dock.
• Portable — apps are matched by bundle identifier with a verified path, and $HOME is tokenised so ~/Downloads works under a different username.
• Reversible — every apply snapshots the whole Dock preference domain first.

Install

brew install --cask bevanjkay/tap/dockwizard   # once released

Or grab the DMG from Releases. The app bundles the dockwizard CLI; install it onto your PATH from Settings → Command Line Tool.

CLI

dockwizard export --save work        # capture the current Dock into the preset library
dockwizard list                      # show Dock tiles with their positions
dockwizard presets                   # show presets in the library
dockwizard diff work                 # what would change
dockwizard apply work                # replace the Dock with the preset
dockwizard apply work --dry-run      # same, without writing
dockwizard restore                   # roll back to the snapshot from the last apply

Positions are 1-indexed and count spacers, matching the order the Dock stores them:

dockwizard add /Applications/Slack.app --position 3
dockwizard add com.apple.Safari --start
dockwizard add spacer --end
dockwizard add https://github.com          # URL tiles go to the folders section
dockwizard remove Trello
dockwizard move 5 2

Exit codes: 0 success, 2 applied with items skipped, 1 error. Add --strict to change nothing unless everything resolves, or --quiet to exit 0 regardless.

Preset location

Presets live in ~/Library/Application Support/DockWizard/presets/. Point that at a dotfiles repository with DOCKWIZARD_PRESETS_DIR, --presets-dir, or Settings → Presets → Library. Any command that takes a preset name also takes a path.

Preset format

{
  "schemaVersion": 1,
  "generator": "dockwizard/0.2.0",
  "name": "Work",
  "description": "Dev and comms, no Adobe",
  "apps": [
    { "type": "app", "bundleId": "com.tinyspeck.slackmacgap",
      "path": "/Applications/Slack.app", "label": "Slack" },
    { "type": "spacer" }
  ],
  "others": [
    { "type": "folder", "path": "~/Downloads", "label": "Downloads",
      "folder": { "showAs": "fan", "displayAs": "folder",
                  "arrangement": "dateAdded", "itemSize": null } },
    { "type": "url", "url": "https://github.com", "label": "GitHub" }
  ],
  "settings": {
    "orientation": "bottom", "tileSize": 48, "magnification": false,
    "autohide": false, "minimizeEffect": "genie", "showRecents": false
  }
}

apps and others mirror the Dock's two lists either side of the divider. Tile types are app, file, folder, url, spacer, smallSpacer and flexSpacer. Folder display options live in a nested folder object, because they only mean anything on a folder tile — itemSize: null is the Dock's "automatic".

settings is optional and partial: only the keys present are written, so a tiles-only preset leaves your Dock's size and position alone. Unknown keys are ignored with a warning rather than failing, but a schemaVersion newer than your build is an error.

Missing apps

Applying resolves each app by its recorded path (verified against the expected bundle identifier, so a stale copy on a mounted disk image can't win), then by LaunchServices, then gives up and reports it. The GUI asks before dropping anything; the CLI warns on stderr and exits 2.

How it works

The Dock is configured entirely through the com.apple.dock preference domain, and there is no public API for it. DockWizard writes through CFPreferences and restarts the Dock.

A tile only needs three keys — tile-type, file-data._CFURLString and file-label. The Dock regenerates GUID, bundle-identifier and the book bookmark blob itself on next launch. That last one matters: book encodes a volume UUID and inode, so a preset containing one would be worthless on any other machine. DockWizard never writes it.

Building

Requires Xcode 26 and XcodeGen.

make generate   # DockWizard.xcodeproj from project.yml
make build      # build the app
make test       # SwiftPM tests
make cli        # just the CLI
make lint       # swiftformat --lint + swiftlint

Developing against your own Dock? make dock-snapshot first and make dock-restore to undo. Be careful with flexible spacers — one will stretch your Dock across the entire screen, which looks like catastrophic corruption and is merely the tile doing its job.

Not the Mac App Store

A sandboxed process cannot write another application's preference domain, so DockWizard cannot be sandboxed and cannot ship on the App Store. Releases are signed with a Developer ID and notarised by Apple.

Licence

MIT.