At work we use Ubuntu with Gnome, which comes with canonical dash to dock fuck up. Where Canonical has taking a perfectly great Gnome extension made by Michele Gaio and made it into a mix between the windows start menu and what ever that psycho trip was. Over the last month, this… thing has foster the discussion of docks. Quite a few of my colleagues, auto hides the default Ubuntu version of dash to dock, some change it to be macOS like, and then there is me who remove it. For some reason that I remove it, confuses people as I am not just a Gnome user, I am also a macOS user. Would I not love a dock? Well the truth is I do not use the dock, not even on macOS. There is I basically just ignore it. In this post I am going to cover why.

So first of on macOS back in the day when it was Mac OS X Leopard, when I returned to Mac. I did actually use the dock, but I reduced its size to be the bare minimum. A dock are a task bar like windows, take up a lot of screen real estate, even on 15” and 16” displays, which is the size I am used to. So I like to reduce the amount of space it takes up, thus minimum size, I am even disabled the magnifier functionality macOS dock has. But what happend if I used to use it? Why did I stop? It is simple really, I stopped using the mouse. A docker is rarely useful when you do not want to move your hands of the keyboard and on to the mouse. For some, I do believe dash to dock support this, you can assign hot keys such that you can launch applications based on the order they have in the dock. But then why the dock, why not just assign a hot key with the same purpose?

Then there is also the fact that I do not like to auto hide a dock and here is why. Unlike, apparently, every body else, I do not fling my mouse to the left or right side of the monitor. I throw it down and almost always I hit centre down of the screen. Which will make the dock show and at least in my experience with dash to dock and the dock on macOS, it does not auto hide again whilst the mouse is on top of it. This annoys me because, the show animation takes my focus away and I sometimes lose train of thoughts.

But how then do I launch apps? Well this actually varies, a tiny bit, between Linux+Gnome and macOS. Let us start with the later, on macOS I hit <CMD>+<SPC> to open spotlight and then I type the application name I need. Usually I only have to type 2-3 letters to get the one I want and then launch it with enter. On Linux, I have very good experiences with hotkeys. So I have my most used applications bound to <Super> + <First letter of application anme>. Emacs for instance is bound to <Super> + e. If it is a less often used application I hit Super and open the Gnome Overview thing and type to search for the application I need. Quite similar to how I used spotlight on macOS. The reason I do not use hotkeys on macOS is due to the fact that I never got it to work properly.

So basically I don’t like the UX of docks anymore. Maybe I will get back to it one day if I ever start using the mouse more. But at least for now I am no dock kind of guy.

Now, before you leave I would like to give some praise dash to dock. This post was never meant as a bashing of Michele’s and all the contributors great work. I did use dash-to-dock on Gnome and I loved it! It is an amazing extension and if you are interested in having the dock experience you should check it out.

./Lars