Plank - Lightweight Dock App

Plank is lightweight dock application for Linux. It is created by Docky team and it will be default Dock in Elementary OS Luna.

The main advances of Plank is simplicity and lightweight.



Lightweight - Plank's start-up time is instant this can significantly increase your start-up time if you replace Plank with Gnome Panel or other dock.

To install Plank first need to add Plank's PPA to software sources, open your terminal and paste:

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:ricotz/docky

sudo apt-get update 

sudo apt-get install plank

By default Plank have most needed items in dock, browser, text editor, movie player.
If you want to add more apps to do dock just start application, right click on app icon and click  "Keep in Dock"

Plank currently don't support Drag & Drop feature.

Themes

If you don't like default theme you can get themes from Cassidy James's devianArt Gallery

To install new theme extract files to ~/.config/plank/theme
This will overwrite current theme, if you want to keep current theme you need to backup it.

Configuration

Plank still don't have UI for configuration so if you wan't to change stuff you need to edit configuration file manually.

Configuration file is located in  ~/.config/plank/settings

In settings file you can change icon size, hide mode and on witch monitor should Plank show if you have dual monitor setup.

[PlankDockPreferences]
#The size of dock icons (in pixels).
IconSize=48
#If 0, the dock won't hide.  If 1, the dock intelligently hides.  If 2, the dock auto-hides.
HideMode=1
#The monitor number for the dock.
Monitor=0

If you want to change dock items order you need to edit .dockitem file located in ~/.config/plank/launchers

[PlankItemsDockItemPreferences]
Launcher=/usr/share/applications/beatbox.desktop
Sort=1001

Increase number to move item to right and decrease to move to left.

PS: if you want to remove "Pank" item from dock just remove  plank.dockitem from ~/.config/plank/launchers

Create Folders

You can create folder items in Plank to group apps or similar.

 Create .dockitem file and in Launcher= point to folder where you have .desktop items.

You can copy .desktop items from /usr/share/application

[PlankItemsDockItemPreferences]
Launcher=/home/ivan/Fixes
Sort=1004