A dock is a dock, right? A line of icon shortcuts for quick access to your apps. The Multi-Column Dock extension for GNOME 45-47 takes that simple idea, but adds organisational features.
A GitHub description describes this as: “a customizable multi-column dock for GNOME Shell Keep your apps neatly organized with grouping, smooth scrolling, easy drag-and-drop reordering, auto-hide, and full multi-monitor support.”
The main draw is that you can group related applications together in the dock, give each grouping a label and background colour and then collapse or expand them on the fly. If you’ve often use a bunch of dev tools or media apps, this helps put more on the dock.
You’re not limited to a single column as this extension enable you spread icons over multiple columns – 1 to 5 – meaning you can have more apps show on the dock with sprawling off the edge, keeping them all accessible and organised.
As well as how many columns the dock uses, you can adjust size of and padding around app icons, colour, opacity and radius of elements, border thickness and colour, and enable and fine-tune auto-hiding behaviours.
Multi-column, narrow appeal?
Though implied by the use of the word ‘columns’ in its name, note that this dock is vertical only. You can’t move it to the bottom, though you can move it to the right. If you are more used to horizontal options like to Dash to Panel or vanilla GNOME Shell, be aware of that.
Also, during my testing on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS I was initially confused as to why apps I assigned to my custom folders did not show up on the dock. Turns out, icons only appear if “pinned” to the dock or open, so can’t use this extension to replace the app picker.
It also isn’t a slim, minimal dock that fades into your desktop background. If you prefer a clean, lean look then this may not suit you.
But if you’ve enough pinned apps on your dock that scanning slows you down, then the functional benefits will trump its form. It certainly scores points with me for its sheer novelty as I’ve not seen something quite like this before.
Get the extension
If you want to try it out, you can do so on GNOME 45 to 47 (Ubuntu 24.04 LTS basically as 24.10 is end of life and I don’t imagine (or hope!) anyone still runs Ubuntu 23.10).
Install it from the GNOME Extensions website via your web browser (follow the setup), or for an easier life just install the Extensions Manager app, open it, search ‘multicolumn dock, and click ‘install’.