The Tips - Mac Kung Fu - page 185

Tip 161
Make the Dock Really, Really Small
You can shrink and enlarge the Dock by clicking and dragging the “Abbey
Road” bar lines that separate the application icons from the stacks on the
Dock (that is, the bars that look like the road-crossing stripes on the Abbey
Road album cover). Alternatively, you can open System Preferences, select
the Dock preference pane, and click and drag the Size slider.
However, your Mac will let you shrink the Dock only to a certain size. This
setting is pretty small, but it's possible to go even smaller.
Shrinking the Dock
To shrink the Dock even more than what is usually allowed, open a Terminal
window (open Finder, select the Applications list, and then in the list of
applications double-click Terminal within the UTILITIES folder), and type the
following:
DEFAULTS WRITE COM.APPLE.DOCK TILESIZE -INT 8;KILLALL DOCK
This will shrink the Dock to half of the supposedly smallest size—for an
example, see Figure 28, Shrinking the Dock to a minuscule size , on page 186 .
The number at the end of the command can range from 1 (too small to be
useful) up to 16, which is the smallest size achievable by clicking and dragging
to resize. You can set values higher than this too, but you might as well use
the built-in Mac tools, such as the System Preferences tool.
Figure 28—Shrinking the Dock to a minuscule size