Can I adjust the time delay for when the dock re-appears? I like to hide the dock unless I need it.  There is a slight delay before it will reappear.  Is there a Terminal setting I can change so that the dock will instantly appear when I move my mouse to the bottom of the screen? I like how things work but want to tweak the timing.
You can manually set the time it takes for the dock to appear using the defaults write commands:


autohide-delay &#x2192; custom appearance delay with dock animation
autohide-time-modifier &#x2192; custom appearance delay without dock animation


First, activate auto-hide in System Preferences &#x2192; Dock &#x2192; Autohide or type &#x2318;+&#x2325;+D

Then open the Terminal and type:

defaults write com.apple.Dock autohide-delay -float 0; killall Dock



0 is the time it takes for the Dock to appear in seconds. You can choose floats and integers e.g. 2, 0.5,...
killall Dock causes the Dock to restart
the syntax is the same for autohide-time-modifier


Restore the default behavior using...

defaults delete com.apple.Dock autohide-delay; killall Dock


According to MacOSHints this trick was found by reverse engineering from the developer Christian Baumgart of Hyperdock.