Unlocking the Dock

With a mistaken Solved marked it may pay to start a new topic to get more helpers in on it.

To find out if it's system wide or user specific, try this...

Open System Preferences>Users & Groups, unlock the lock, click on the little plus icon, make a new admin account, log out & into the new account.

Is the Dock mutable in the new account?

Only idea I have is do a get info on...

/System/Library/CoreServices/Dock.app

Is the Locked box checked?

Oh wait, did you try Sudo defaults write com.apple.dock contents-immutable -bool false ?

Are you running in an admin account?

Maybe Disable SIP?

https://www.macworld.com/article/2986118/how-to-modify-system-integrity-protection-in-el-capitan.html

Not sure why this question was marked as solved. It's not solved. The indicated checkbox in the app info pane is also unchecked for me, yet the dock is locked and I can neither check nor uncheck that box.

The com.apple.dock prefs file that the default writes command references no longer exists, so that is no longer an option.

The upgrade to Catalina has put items into the doc that I cannot remove. That shouldn't happen, but it did. I'd like to remove them.

Even with the new account I cannot change the lock attribute. It says that I do not have the necessary permissions to write to the directory. It's 755 but even when I click the lock and authenticate I can't change that.

Well you and I might think that, however it is seems to be the Catalina model now.

Once you restart it with SIP -->off<-- the computer is in read only as part of the new security Model it would seem. However you can run "sudo mount -uw /" to make it read/write. I did that and the lock checkmark would now accept changes and finally hold its' value. But unfortunately, checking it as either locked or unlocked however did nothing at all when I rebooted back into normal user mode with sip turned back on. I tried both. Of course with sip on the checkmark would not accept changes, as we now know. The checkmark simply doesn't seem to be followed. On, off, whatever, the dock stays locked. Additionally, out of curiosity I again disabled sip, remounted r/w, and then went into the Dock.app/Contents/info.plist prefs file and added a key and value for contents-immutable testing both False and True and that did nothing.

I'm totally stumped.

I know that I am not the only person that had fumblitis and locked the dock to keep from accidentally shoving icons off of it. I know that I am not the only person that is going to see the new icons that Catalina put into it and want to remove them. There's got to be a way to unlock this dock and get them off.

To this point Catalina has been mostly fine. 1password's chrome plugin has an issue on Catalina that they are aware of and have been working on. That will be fixed soon. My old MS Office 2013 was 32 bit of course no longer works. It might require expensive replacement but there are alternatives which get better and better all the time. I don't use it daily, fortunately for me. And this lock thing because I have now have dock icons I do not want.

But my biggest gripe is that Nerdtool no longer works. And of course it has not been updated in 8 years, so that's a done deal there. Shame, as that's the one I really really miss the most.

I finally got this, so I thought that I'd come back and post it for others that have this issue upon upgrading to Catalina.

The terminal trick with defaults write etc, no longer works (read the big warning buried down toward the bottom of the defaults man pages).

The correct way to do it now is with plutil. Maybe always was, in fact.

to unlock it

$: plutil -replace contents-immutable -bool NO  com.apple.dock.plist; killall Dock

to lock it

$: plutil -replace contents-immutable -bool YES  com.apple.dock.plist; killall Dock

Whoa, have never seen it put the whole file system in R/O mode!???

Something else is seriously wrong.

Uhhhhg, Catalina... luckily I have no Macs capable of those big of headaches. ;)

Sad to see useful Apps go by the wayside, recently install 10.6.8 Server in a VM & now have dozens of irreplaceable & useful Apps again.

That gave me a why didn't I think of that moment. Buuuuut, it didn't work. That puts the entire file system into read only mode, so the dock lock can't be changed.

I really thought you had it!