Skip Navigation

Dock menus

On a Mac, people can secondary click an app’s or game’s icon in the Dock to reveal a Dock menu, which presents both system-provided and custom items.

A stylized representation of a menu extending from an icon in the Dock. The image is tinted red to subtly reflect the red in the original six-color Apple logo.

The system-provided Dock menu items can vary depending on whether the app is open. For example, the Dock menu for Safari includes menu items for actions like viewing a current window or creating a new window.

Best practices

As with all menus, you need to label Dock menu items succinctly and organize them logically. For guidance, see Menus.

Make custom Dock menu items available in other places, too. Not everyone uses a Dock menu, so it’s important to offer the same commands elsewhere, like in your menu bar menus or within your interface.

Prefer high-value custom items for your Dock menu. For example, a Dock menu can list all currently or recently open windows, making it a convenient way to jump to the window people want. Also consider listing a few of the actions that are most likely to be useful when your app isn’t frontmost or when there are no open windows. For example, Mail includes items for getting new mail and composing a new message in addition to listing all open windows.

Platform considerations

Not supported in iOS, iPadOS, tvOS, visionOS, or watchOS.

Resources

Menus

Home Screen quick actions

Developer documentation

applicationDockMenu(_:) — AppKit

Current page is Dock menus