The removal of the ‘Dodge’ feature from Unity’s launcher in Ubuntu 12.04 bugged a lot of people.

But rather than sit and complain about not having it a couple of Ubuntu users have brought it back by forking Unity, adding some patches and stuffing the resulting version into a PPA for easy installation.

Re-Enable Unity Dodge

I don’t recommend installing this third-part fork of Unity unless you’re competent enough to add and remove PPAs, as well as clean up breakages that can be caused by doing this.

With that warning out of the way all that’s needed to get the feature is to add the following PPA to your Software Sources:

  • sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ikarosdev/unity-revamped
  • sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

Once eveyrthing has updated and upgraded just log-out and back in for the changes to take effect.

You’ll now find that dodge – as well as launcher item clicking to ‘minimise/restore’ – behaviours are back in your Unity Launcher.

Caveats

It should go without saying that, as this is a third-party tinkering it is not officially supported. As such expect bugs and, when official Unity updates are installed, things to break.

To remove this version of Unity run the following commands: –

  • sudo apt-get install ppa-purge
  • sudo ppa-purge ppa:ikarosdev/unity-revamped
Now log out and back in and the ‘stock’ version of Unity should be installed.

via Michael S. J.