A new version of the immensely popular GNOME extension ‘Dash to Dock’ is now available.
The extension moves the GNOME Shell application launcher bar (known as the ‘dash’) from the overview window and places it on the desktop. The extension also exposes a variety of customisation options, including placement (left, right, bottom), theming, and placement of the applications dashboard button.
Dash to Dock v56
The latest update to Dash to Dock introduces a number of long-requested features, including live window previews, keyboard shortcuts and the ability to cycle through windows using a mouse scroll wheel.
Window Previews
Fancy seeing windows previews in a Windows style manner? Now you can. A new option lets you toggling on window previews in the right-click menu on dock items.
By default the preview is closed by default and needs to be opened on click. An option to invert this behaviour is likely to be included in a future update.
Keyboard shortcuts
Want to launch and interact with app windows using keyboard shortcuts, just like you can on the Unity launcher? Well, now you can!
Optional keyboard shortcuts can be enabled to trigger application launchers with <Super>1 through <Super>0 shortcuts, following the order of apps in the dock from left to right.
Mouse Scroll Wheel Cycling
When multiple windows are open for an application in the dock you can use your mouse scroll wheel to cycle through them when hovering over the app icon.
It should be noted that this, like other features in this update, needs to be explicitly enabled through the extension’s settings section, and that it may cause issues when enabled alongside the fixed-size/scrollable dock option.
Wayland support
With Fedora 25 among the distros now defaulting to the Wayland display server by default this update nixes a couple of pesky bugs affecting Wayland sessions.
Other Changes:
- Implement windows previews in the apps menu
- Add hotkeys option
- Add border style customization
- Autohide: the whole screen edge sensitive
- Improve Wayland support
- Add cycle through windows on scroll option
- Fix: set popup menu max width
Install Dash to Dock GNOME Extension
The Dash to Dock extension can be installed from the GNOME Extensions website, or downloaded and installed manually from the Github, and should work just dandy on GNOME Shell 3.18, GNOME 3.20, and on the most recent release, GNOME 3.22.
Upgrade Dash to Dock
Already have the extension installed? Don’t know how to upgrade a GNOME extension? It’s relatively easy, but not immediately obvious.
Just pop along to the GNOME Extensions website in a browser that supports GNOME Extensions (i.e. Epiphany, Firefox <51, etc) and head to the ‘installed extensions’ tab.
You’ll see a list of all installed extensions. Click the green upward facing arrow beside the Dash to Dock entry to upgrade the extension.