[How to] Use the Xfce panel as a lightweight and practical dock

I'm sure a number of us use some "Dock" in our day to dayI include myself), They may be light as Plank, full of features like AWN, singles like Docky or simply a iconified panel of our desktop, anything goes. Now, I was surprised that there was no Xfce dashboard plugin, so it occurred to me to try to create one based on the standard window list. Which I did not do, because while I was searching the Xfce repository, I got a complement that fulfilled this function: Task Bar, which fulfills the function of list of windows and launchers at the same time.

Well yes, I was surprised not to find anything in the Debian Testing repositories, and I was enlightened when I saw it. For those who use Debian or derivatives, I went to the trouble of creating a package .deb with checkinstall ^. ^ But first they may need the package libwnck-1.0 (plugin uses it for windows). You can download the package here.

Features

• Lets "anchor" (Yes, I know it's a Docky term, but it's understood) open applications.
• In case of more than one open window for an application (the browser, Pidgin, etc) clicking on it will show some frames highlighting each one, as well as a small list to choose which one to open.
• Does not allow "dragging" the icons (somewhere it had to fail, right?).
• Similar configuration to the standard Window List.
• Allows you to edit the path of the executable to launch (explained why in the end).
• It does not activate any kind of smart hide (maybe obvious, but I'll put it just in case ...)

I will also explain how to compile it in your favorite distribution, although of course, I will use Debian as an example.

First of all, we need install git to be able to "clone" (to copy) the code from the Xfce repository 😛 So we open a terminal, and execute (as root):

apt-get install git

Now, we need to clone the folder where the plugin code is. In the same terminal we execute:

git clone git: //git.xfce.org/panel-plugins/xfce4-taskbar-plugin

With that, we will download the folder to our Home (or where we are at that moment). Now before continuing, we must install multiple dependencies development to compile and install the plugin. If I remember correctly, they are:

xfce4-dev-tools xfce4-panel-dev libxfce4ui libexo-1-dev exo-utils libxfconf-0-dev libwnck-1.0

Now, in a terminal we write the following commands, one by one:

cd xfce4-taskbar-plugin

make

sudo make install

Attention XNUMX-hourIf you happen to get an error after running make, saying that a package / library is missing, install it with your package manager.

Ready, we already have the Task Bar installed 😀 Now it only remains to go to right click on the panel> Panel preferences> Elements> Click Add> Task Bar, and then we put it where we like it.

Comments

1. If (e.g.), have downloaded Firefox from the official page (yes, the one to unzip and run) and when "anchoring" it to the panel, do not allow them to launch it: Edit the file ~ / .config / xfce4 / panel / taskbar / taskbar.rc and where it says «command =»Put the path of the Firefox executable, and then it should work. This applies with other "portable" applications.
2. If it is an installed application, as is the case with Thunar, we can't launch it from there for some reason (similar things have happened to me with Docky). However, if we do gksu-thunar if it works ... Quite curious.
3. This panel applet is still under development (not very constant but still), so it may contain one or another bug (apart from thunar, I haven't found any).
4. If by chance the panel does not show the icon according to your current theme, you can modify the icon corresponding to each application in ~ / .config / xfce4 / panel / taskbar / just by placing the corresponding image with the previous name.

Well folks, it's all for the moment. In the next few days I'll be testing and reviewing more applets from the repository here, so stay tuned 😉 Greetings!