Rearranging Dock Icons is Impossible

Question

Level 1

33 points

Rearranging Dock Icons is Impossible

Yes, this has been asked before, has been marked as solved, and CLEARLY ISN'T!!!! None of the answers given in that thread work. I've been using Mac OS since 1984, OSX since Tiger and for the first time ever, a simple thing like moving my Dock icons to an order that suits _MY_ workflow seems impossible.

Macbook AIr M1 Gen 1 (obvs...) Grab and drag will not move any of the icons. I can control-click (2 finger tap) to add or remove icons, but NONE of the icons will move, by any convention, not with the aid of any modifier key. This is a garbage move, Apple. This is changing a convention for that sake of it and is NOT acceptable. I am the owner of this hardware, I have the _RIGHT_ to organise my display how I want it, not how you do! Hark, wait, I can hear Steve Jobs screaming it the engineers who made this messed up decision from the afterlife.

Now fing fix it.

Or tell me what the fing fix is, because I am not going to delete every single up from the dock and add it back in in order, just to get the bloody layout I want.

MacBook Air

Posted on Dec 3, 2020 6:12 PM

Reply

Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

Stephen Jay Author

Level 1

33 points

Dec 4, 2020 5:44 AM in response to wild sun

OK, it took me hours to find anything, anywhere (guess that's what we get for adopting early) however, the problem is touch and force touch are too close together, sensitivity-wise. It was especially difficult for me, as I have a mild peripheral neuropathy in my fingertips due to platinoid chem treatments a few years back, and I reckon the "design" of touch/force touch are ableist.

It's fixed by going to the Trackpad Preference pane, point and click tab, then turn off force touch and haptic feedback.

[Edited by Moderator]

Reply

Answer 2

Meg The Dog

Level 6

13,591 points

Dec 3, 2020 6:29 PM in response to Stephen Jay

Are you talking about changing the order they appear in the dock, or are you talking about changing the icons location on the desktop?

I can move an icons position on the dock by clicking on it and dragging. I can move the icons on the desktop to a new location by clicking and dragging.

Running Big Sur 11.0.1 on a 2019 iMac.

MtD

Reply

Answer 3

wild sun

Level 1

24 points

Dec 4, 2020 5:33 AM in response to Stephen Jay

This requires some arcane skills now. The timing window is like two microseconds before the show all windows code kicks in. If you click and immediately drag, then 4 times out of 10 you'll drag the icon off the dock and be able to move it to where you want. Something is seriously wrong in the way the click and hold functionality is working because in this case it's a crapshoot as to which UI function works when and is extremely annoying (does this now meet the 'moderation' standards?)

If you've found out how to 'click to top' in mail on a MacBook Pro with no Home key that would be great to know as that also is suboptimal in this release!

Reply

Answer 4

dialabrain

Level 10

125,507 points

Dec 4, 2020 5:59 AM in response to wild sun

wild sun wrote:

If you've found out how to 'click to top' in mail on a MacBook Pro with no Home key that would be great to know as that also is suboptimal in this release!

There is no 'click to top' any longer. "command option up-arrow" still works.

Reply

Answer 5

Stephen Jay Author

Level 1

33 points

Dec 4, 2020 6:03 AM in response to dialabrain

Can't help with that, I've been using gmail in a Chrome tab for more than a decade, now. I literally never use Mail or Safari and, although the Big Sur Safari looks like a mature product, I prefer Chrome's handling of downloads and tabs.

Reply

Answer 6

wild sun

Level 1

24 points

Dec 4, 2020 6:32 AM in response to dialabrain

And I thought Big Sur was inspired by iOS... replacing a single click with a three key shortcut seems both counterintuitive and counter the design ethos of this release. Sigh.

BTW I've also discovered in the Mail Menu - Edit > Find - that ^Cmd-T is Jump to Top. I guess that's the official keyboard shortcut. It also happens to be the default shortcut to show/hide Todoist.

Replacing touchpad clicks and gestures with a 'new' keyboard shortcuts makes no sense. Not only is the OS bound to step on an existing keyboard shortcut, they're not 'touch' friendly.

Another big sigh for Big Sur (or does that infringe on the moderation standards?)

Reply