Search Suggest

A Guide To Using Plank Dock On Linux

Plank is a Linux dock that allows starting pinned applications and manage open windows, for X11 environments (Wayland is not supported). This article presents an overview of Plank, how to install it on popular Linux distributions, how to install new themes, how to use multiple docks (e.g. with multiple monitors) and more.

This is Plank dock using the default settings and its preferences window:

Plank dock and its preferences

And here's Plank again, with a third-party theme, docklets (Show Desktop and Trash), the Plank icon that allows accessing its preferences and quit the dock (on the left-hand side of the dock), a folder pinned to the dock, and icon zoom enabled:

Plank dock custom theme icon zoom

Below you'll find a video too, so you can see the Plank icon zoom animation (icon zoom is not available on elementary and Fedora due to possible patent infringement):


Plank is a dock designed to be stylish yet simple, and it is by default, but it does have some advanced features including a library that can be used to create docks based on Plank. It uses Gtk3 but it should work on any desktop environment (including KDE Plasma - it only pulls a few Gtk dependencies), as long as it's using X11.

A window manager with compositing (like Mutter, Compiz, Marco, Muffin, Metacity, KWin, or Xfwm) or a separate composite manager (like Compton) is needed for effects and transparency, although Plank works without it.

Plank features:

  • Shows running application icons and allows pinning applications to the dock
  • Drag'n'drop to rearrange icons in the dock
  • Multiple hide modes: intellihide, autohide (always hide until moving the mouse near the bottom of the screen), dodge maximized window, window dodge, dodge active window, with configurable hide and unhide delay and optional pressure (so you don't accidentally reveal it) to reveal the dock
  • Configurable position on screen: bottom, top, left or right
  • Multiple alignment possibilities: center, fill (which fills the dock background for 100% of the screen width, making it appear as a panel; in this setup you can change the icon arrangement to the center, start or end of the dock), start (left or top, depending on the dock orientation) and end (right or bottom, depending if the dock is horizontal or vertical).
  • Configurable icon size, and optional icon zoom effect (with configurable zoom level); the icon zoom feature is disabled on elementary OS and Fedora due to possible patent infringement
  • Can be set to only show pinned items to function like a launcher only (not showing running applications), useful in multi-docks setups in which one dock serves only as a launcher (showing only pinned applications)
  • Can show only the applications running on the current workspace
  • Allows choosing the monitor on which the dock is shown
  • Supports docklets and comes with a few built-in (these are applets / standalone tools running inside Plank, e.g. Clippy, a clipboard manager, a battery indicator, a show desktop or a trash icon)
  • Theme support
  • Run multiple docks in the same time, each with its own configuration (this functionality is not exposed in the Plank preferences)

Đăng nhận xét