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 from Elementary daily PPA, open your terminal and paste:

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:elementary-os/daily
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"

Or just drag and drop.

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 /usr/share/plank/themes

Or you can get more themes from Elementary Community PPA:

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:versable/elementary-update
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install elementary-plank-themes

Configuration

Plank still don't have UI for configuration so if you wan't to change stuff you need to edit configuration file manually (if you have Elementary OS go to Setting > Desktop > Dock, or with Elementary tweak Settings > Tweaks > Plank).

Elementary tweak

Default plank setting in Elementary OS

Configuration file is located in  ~/.config/plank/dock1/settings

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

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