Dock keeps moving between monitors

At least on my Mac Pro with three thunderbolt displays, this works: go to preferences>Display>arrangement and just drag the white bar (not the whole blue square) to the monitor you want it to be on. So far it seems to stay put.

Like everyone else, this has really been p****ing me off. However, using the workaround I found that it only works with the Trackpad and does not work with the Genius mouse!

Sputnik is spot on, but the key word is "center" of the screen. I've been completelly flumoxed by this one as well and that is the key. If run your mouse to the dead-middle of a monitor (go too far even) it will pull the dock there. If you go down but not in the middle and then move to the middle, maybe 30% of the time that it works. And then, trying to do it correctly will fail - you need to go to another monitor, click on some stuff, maybe even move the dock THERE, then go to the target monitor and it will work. I think the 30% bit is why people see it as random. It's definitely not a clean UI control.

+1, Sputnik.

Looks like a feature for when the dock is on the bottom.

A fix is (and it's a personal preference) to stick your dock to the right or left edge, it'll stay put from then on.

I work with a Cintiq also, and it doesn't leave my main monitor.

That works when your 'primary' monitor is on the left or right of other monitors, but if you're like me where you have the primary monitor in the middle between two secondary monitors it will place the dock on one of the secondary monitors instead of the left or right of the primary monitor.

thanks for sorting that

Thank you - this helped! At least now we know how to control the behavior.

For some reason, I was able to work around this problem initially, but now that I've updated Mavericks it's returned with no solution.

With "Displays have separate spaces" unchecked on my new work machine last month, I was able to have the menu bar show on all three of my monitors (MacBook, Thunderbolt, Wacom Cintiq) but the dock would stay at the bottom of my Thunderbolt where I wanted it.

Now I either have to get rid of the menu bar on the Cintiq, or suffer with the dock popping up every time I make a long brushstroke or use toolbars on the bottom of the screen. Since I have my Thunderbolt in the center, setting the dock position to left or right either puts it over my Adobe toolbars on the Cintiq, or squashed onto the far side of the laptop.

The best "workaround" I've found is to detach the toolbars from the sides of Photoshop + Illustrator and shorten them so that I never have to use the bottom inch of my Cintiq. =_=;

We need to be able to set the dock and menu bars independently, otherwise, those of us with art desk jobs are losing a lot of productivity.

I've been battling this "feature" for months. Ugh. Get rid of it, Apple!

Thanks Squigler. Your circumvention takes a little getting used to, but the does not float around any more.

Thank you, man. You saved my day. I was like so bothered by this feature, until you figured it out. Honestly, I still don't think it looks like a feature. But I just learn to avoid it and "fix" it, since I can reproduce the "feature" every time now.

Oh man! Thanks Sputnik!

I noticed this when I got my new MacBook Pro with Mavericks pre-installed. The Dock would magically and seemingly randomly jump to my built-in monitor from my external 30". Today I noticed that when I was trying to grab a corner of a window that was filling the screen, the dock made the leap. I thought maybe it was a hot corner setting but no.

Now that I know it's a feature, I'm going to use it!

That's exaclty it. I use a Cintiq 13HD and discovered this by accident - you have to "click" on the monitor you want it to appear and then move the cursor to where the dock would be. This makes the dock appear there.

I confirm this bug on Mavericks (10.9.4) with one external monitor attached to a MBP 15" non-retina. The two screens belong to the same space. It happened a few times in the recent past but I thought I did something wrong. Then a few minutes ago, while I was NOT touching the keyboard nor the magic trackpad, the dock suddenly switched from my external monitor to my MBP screen... Ahem.

This was doing my head in. I kept manually moving the Dock/menu in the display settings to get it back. 😊

It's not a bad feature, but I agree that you should be able to turn it off