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Appearance#

Open Settings → Appearance to change CoolDock's scale, density, colors, and surfaces.

App appearance#

Choose Auto, Light, or Dark for CoolDock's windows. Auto follows the current macOS appearance. This setting affects CoolDock windows; Dock Style controls the Dock bar and widget surfaces separately.

Performance#

Turn on Reduce transparency to replace the glass blur on the Dock bar and every widget tile with a solid background. This greatly lowers GPU use on multi-display setups and is also enabled automatically when macOS Reduce Transparency is active.

Size and spacing#

  • Dock Size scales the Dock bar, widgets, and the gaps around them from Small to Large. Expansion panels and profile tabs keep their default size.
  • Widget Spacing changes the gap between widgets and app icons from Compact to Spacious (0–20 pt, 6 pt by default).
  • When Widgets Don't Fit chooses Adapt Size (the default) or Scroll.

Widget presentation#

Widget Colors offers Colorful, which keeps each widget's accent colors, or Monochrome, which removes accent colors from charts, controls, and widget chrome for a neutral look.

Under Widget Tiles, Tile backgrounds & borders (on by default) adds frosted fills and outlines around each widget tile. Turn it off to let widget content sit directly on the Dock plate. With the Transparent Dock style, tile surfaces are always drawn and this switch is replaced by the widget surface choice described below.

App icon style#

On macOS 15 and later, App Icon Style renders app icons as Default (full color), Auto (Default in Light Mode, Dark in Dark Mode), Dark (opaque dark tiles with muted glyphs), or Monochrome (desaturated). Dark and Monochrome are rendered by macOS.

Dock styles#

Available styles include:

  • Light Glass (the default)
  • Liquid Glass on macOS Tahoe (26) and later
  • Dark Glass
  • White
  • Black
  • Transparent

Light Glass and Dark Glass use the same frosted glass, with a darker backdrop for Dark Glass. Liquid Glass uses the native macOS glass plate with frosted white widget tiles; on earlier macOS versions it is not offered and CoolDock uses its lighter Frost rendering mode with one Dock blur and lightweight tiles.

Transparent removes the Dock bar plate and lets you choose a separate Widget surface style (glass, white, black, and so on) for the widget tiles.