The Dock

The Dock

A row of application icons along one edge of the screen. It is drawn by the compositor itself — not by the bar, not by a separate program — so it survives the bar being turned off, and it is themed by the same palette everything else on the desktop is.

It is not the bar. The bar is the strip with the clock and the tray; the dock is the icons.

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The short version

Right-click the dock	every setting on this page, as a menu
Right-click an icon	pin/unpin, new window, close, quit — at the bottom of that menu
Drag an icon	reorder it
Drag the dock body	move it to another edge, or another monitor
Control panel ▸ Desktop	the same settings with descriptions

Everything the menu writes goes to ~/.config/synui/dock.state, so a dock arranged by pointer comes back the way it was left.

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The right-click menu

Two menus, depending on where the click lands.

On the bar body you get the dock's own settings: auto-hide, magnify, the clock, the apps button, the power button, where each of those sits, which edge the dock is on, and a link into the control panel.

On an icon you get all of that plus that application's own rows — Unpin from Dock, New Window, Close Window, Quit All Windows — at the bottom, under a rule.

Why the app's rows are last. That block is one to four rows depending on whether the icon is pinned, whether the app has a launcher and whether it is running. With it on top every setting below it shifted by up to four positions from one icon to the next, and "Auto-hide Dock" was never twice in the same place. Below the settings, the dock's rows start at the top of the menu on every icon. The menu also opens upward from a bottom dock, so the last rows are the ones nearest your pointer — which is sitting on the icon those rows are about.

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Where it lives

Key	Values	What it does
dock_edge	bottom top left right	Which edge. left/right draw a vertical column
dock_enabled	on off	Whether there is a dock at all
dock_autohide	on (default) off	Off keeps it on screen always
dock_on_top	on off (default)	Only means anything with auto-hide off: on, the dock floats over windows; off, windows cover it. An auto-hiding dock is always on top, so the menu hides this row rather than showing a switch that is ignored
dock_hover_margin	4 (px)	How close to the edge the pointer must get to bring it back

A vertical dock is a column, and a column cannot widen. That is what dock_clock_analog below is for.

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Size and shape

Key	Default	What it does
dock_height	64 (px)	The slab and the icons — icons are this minus 16
dock_radius	26 (px)	Its corners. Clamped at draw time to half the dock's thickness, so past that the number stops doing anything
dock_magnify	on	Icons under the pointer swell and the run slides apart to make room
dock_magnify_scale	1.60	How big the one under the pointer gets (1.00–2.50)
dock_style	auto solid glass	auto is glass on a glass theme and a tinted slab elsewhere
dock_opacity	auto	How much wallpaper shows through. auto is the theme's own answer — frosted (0.05) on the two Prisms, a 0.72 slab on the other thirteen. 0.00 is a row of icons on the wallpaper; the icons are opaque whatever this says

The house desktop ships dock_radius = 64, which the clamp turns into a capsule, and leaves the opacity on auto — which on Prism is 0.05. See Glass.

⚠ Until synui 467 the dock was the one surface with no way to ask its theme: it kept its compiled 0.72 whatever was on screen, so a Prism desktop came up with a see-through bar, see-through windows and a solid slab of a dock. That is why the house desktop briefly had to write a glass level down.

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Pinned applications

dock_pin = firefox foot synfiles

Space-separated app_ids or .desktop basenames. Pin and unpin from the icon's right-click menu; drag to reorder.

⚠ The .desktop basename must equal the app_id. A pin is matched by name, and StartupWMClass is ignored — so an application whose window reports one id and whose launcher file is called something else pins as two different things. If an icon will not stay pinned, that is why.

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The three cells

Besides applications, the dock can carry a clock, an apps button and a power button. Each is a cell in the run, each can be turned off, and each can be dragged to a different position in the row.

Key	Default
dock_clock	off	Time and date in a cell of its own. Off because the bar already has a clock, and a desktop showing the time twice is a choice rather than something to undo
dock_clock_analog	off	Draw it as a dial. The one clock that fits a vertical dock — a column cannot widen for a time string, but a dial is square
dock_apps_button	on	The "show all apps" grid at the end of the run. On, because a dock of pinned icons has no route to an application that is not on it
dock_power_button	on	Lock / Log Out / Suspend / Restart / Shut Down. On for the same reason: none of those five is a program, so no arrangement of icons reaches them
dock_clock_slot dock_apps_slot dock_power_slot	-1	Where each sits. -1 is past the last icon; written by dragging the cell

The power menu has no confirmation dialog, and that is deliberate rather than missing: the menu is the confirmation. Pressing the button commits to nothing, and nothing fires until a second, aimed press lands on a named row.

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Icons

Dock icons come from the icon theme, and follow the desktop:

• On a monochrome wallpaper they go monochrome with everything else.
• The clock, apps grid, power mark and the running dots are drawn by synui rather than pulled from a theme, so they can be the colour that reads on this bar on every preset — and on a see-through dock they measure what is actually behind them rather than trusting the theme's ink.

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See also

• The Desktop — the bar, widgets, themes, layouts
• Bar Plugins — third-party widgets for the bar
• Settings — the control panel
• Keybindings