Cannot move or rearrange any icons in the Dock.

I was experiencing the same frustration with El Capitan, but discovered that the solution (in my case) was simpler than deleting, restarting, resolving extensions conflicts, running Disk Utility, or entering code in Terminal or Xcode. I did try deleting and restarting, No difference.

I found that if I delayed beyond the initial click on the icon the drop down menu appeared and I was unable to drag. But, if I clicked and dragged immediately the menu did not appear and I could move the icon. If I dragged the icon too high in the Dock - similar to deleting an icon - the other icons would not create a space; however, if I dragged the icon in line with the others, they would separate, and I could drag and rearrange. Simple.

I hope this is helpful.

PS: You cannot move Finder or Trash.

Mac mini, OSX 10.11.1, Magic Trackpad

I so liked this clear description of a difficult physical movement,

This solution does not work for me. No matter what delay I try after a single click I cannot move the app icon to a different position.

I was able to move an icon as follows: I went to my Applications folder. I clicked and dragged the app icon in question to the desired position in the dock (note there was already present the icon for that app in the dock -- the one that wouldn't move). Upon dragging to the desired position, the original icon moved to the desired position.

However, I consider this very non-intuitive, cumbersome and probably unintended. The traditional behavior of dragging the icon to the desired position is still not working.....

You should be able to rearrange the dock the same as you always have. With ease that is. My guess is that somehow the permissions on your dock plist has somehow got messed up. How you choose to go about fixing it can be done in multiple ways. I will give you what I think is the easier of the two I know.

If you want to test my theory of it being your users preference file, you could try logging in as another user. You could either create another user account if only temporarily or by logging in as the guest user. From there you could test to see if you can move the dock items around with ease. This would tell you if the problem lies within your users account folder or if the error lies within your entire computer.

The fix.

Go to Macintosh HD > Users > "Your Users name" > Library ( Hidden Folder ) > Preferences

Quick way to get to this location is whilst in Finder select Go ( in Menubar ) > Go to Folder... and put in ~/Library/Preferences

Locate and delete ( com.apple.dock.plist )

Your computer will regenerate a new .plist file. on restart. Do note however that it will set your preferences to their default settings as well as there are other preferences for other things hidden in the dock.plist that will also get set back to default. They are easy to fix as you just have to reset them to your liking.

Restart Your computer

Test to see if it fixed your problem.

Hope that helps,

Weston

Weston,

Yes! Your solution worked. I deleted the com.apple.dock.plist file and rebooted. Now I can move icons as expected.

Many thanks!

TThis worked a treat. Thanks so much, I was getting really frustrated with it too.

Awesome, that did the trick for me 🙂