One of the first things I do on any new Mac is change the Dock so that my Trash is always in the corner rather than floating around as icons are added or removed from the Dock. This makes it very easy to drag items to the Trash because it’s always in the same spot. It’ll always be in the bottom-right corner if your Dock is positioned on the bottom or the right of the screen. And Trash will be in the bottom-left corner if your Dock is positioned on the left of the screen.

You have to set the Dock preferences so that the end of the Dock is pinned to the edge of the screen. But wait, that doesn’t show up in System Preferences for the Dock! Instead, you have to use the Terminal to enter some commands to set a hidden preference. This is really easy to do even if you’re not comfortable with the Terminal application or command line interfaces in general. But, typing the wrong thing into the Terminal can be fairly destructive – you’ve been warned. If you’re ready, Terminal can be found in the Utilities folder within your Applications folder.

Just type the following commands into Terminal one after the other and your Dock will disappear for a second and when it comes back the Trash will be in the corner.

defaults write com.apple.Dock pinning end

killall Dock