Your Mac's Dock has two sides. The left one fills up with whatever you open. The right one, the strip behind the divider next to the Trash, is where you keep the things you actually care about: your launcher, your work folders, the apps you reach for every day.
macOS gives you almost no control over that side. You can drag items in, but reordering them is fiddly, folders turn into stacks you never asked for, and the one spot everyone wants, right next to the Trash, is nearly impossible to hit.
DockSide fixes that.
- See every item on the right side of your Dock in one list, with its real icon and name.
- Reorder by dragging. The bottom of the list is the spot next to the Trash, and DockSide shows you exactly where that is.
- Add any app, not just the ones Apple thinks you should pin. Drop an app from Finder onto the list and it becomes a Dock item.
- Add folders and stacks, and choose how they look: as a folder or as a stack, sorted by name, date, or kind.
- Save the whole right side as a profile. Set up "Work" and "Home" once, switch between them in two clicks.
- Change your mind? Undo takes the Dock back to how it was, and DockSide keeps the last few versions of your setup as backups.
One click on Apply to Dock and the Dock restarts with your new arrangement. That's the whole workflow: arrange, apply, done.
DockSide reads and writes the same settings file the Dock itself uses. It doesn't hack anything, doesn't run anything in the background, and doesn't touch the left side of your Dock or anything else on your Mac. Before every change it saves a backup of your current setup.
- A Mac with macOS 26 or newer
The project is a plain Xcode project (SwiftUI, no external dependencies). Open DockSide.xcodeproj, pick your signing team under Signing & Capabilities, and build. The app is ad hoc signed by default and intentionally not sandboxed, because it manages Dock preferences.
The icon is a layered Icon Composer bundle (DockSide.icon) with light, dark, and tinted appearances. Scripts/MakeIconLayers.swift regenerates its tiles layer.
DockSide is a project by sys-worx.net.