I recently got a MacBook Pro at work.  I’ve been slowly adjusting to OS X.  I’ll post more on the adjustments I knew I’d have to make and the ones that suprised me later.  However, I found a nick trick that took longer to find than I thought it would, so I’d blog it.

The OS X dock has its good and bad points, but its important due to that’s where minimized apps go and where running apps keep there icons.  However, by default, it is centered and that doesn’t jive with how I like to place windows.  Especially when coding.  Based on the information given here at applepedia and the definition at this O’Reilly article I was able to figure out how to put it into the lower left or lower right corner.  Click on the image here to see a screenshot of the dock put in its place.

The feature is called pinning.  Just do the following from the command line:

# defaults write com.apple.dock pinning -string start

After you restart the doc (by either logging back in or a nice "killall Dock.app" that will pin the dock to the left.  If you want to lock it to the right, switch the start to end.