Simdock

Official website: https://github.com/onli/simdock
Current version: 1.3+20140611+54
Released: 2014-06-11

Background

Simdock is a simple dock with pseudo-transparency. It was created back in 2007 by Simone Della Longa and packaging for Ubuntu has continued by onli who upkeeps a daily ppa. It is written in C++ and does not need a compositing window manager, theoretically making it ideal for simple and lean desktop setups like Openbox. It supports Mac OS-X like icon zooming.

Installation

Add the ppa to Debian via Synaptic along with the signing key:
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/onli/simdock/ubuntu trusty main
key: 2ABB95B0
You will need to install these dependencies first:

• libwxbase2.8-0
• libwxgtk2.8-0
• libxcb-ewmh2
• xcb-proto

Then you need to nab libwnck22 from Ubuntu as the naming convention in Debian is different:
http://packages.ubuntu.com/trusty/libs/libwnck22

Finally you can install Simdock after all dependencies are satisfied.

Running Simdock

After installation, certainly on XFCE, there wasn’t a menu entry, but running simdock from a run command or terminal popped up the dock at the bottom of the screen. The dock always stays on top of the windows, but windows have to be maximized to sit on top of it:


The icons were also very small, but when I ran my mouse over the dock, they increased in size one by one. Firefox was pinned by default.

There was a background ‘shelf’ image behind the dock, providing a sort of Mac OS-X 3-D effect. There was also a ‘shadow’ effect below each icon. A small blue ellipse beneath each icon showed running applications. Icons can be kept in the dock or removed as required.

Under XFCE I had to make sure under the compositor settings that “Show shadows under dock windows” was not enabled to achieve true transparency.

Customization

There’s no documentation so to speak of and no themes that could be found via Google. There is a GUI menu for what customization is available via right-clicking the dock and choosing Settings:


After some trial and error I discovered that the dock needs to be closed and restarted for most of the changes to take effect which meant experimenting with the settings was somewhat frustrating.

You can change the level of the zoom effect, icon size and spacing, whether to show or hide ‘reflexes’ (reflections beneath icons) and what the background image and size should be. There are other more cryptic values that can be altered such as ‘range’ and ‘blur length’. There is also a checkbox for automatic positioning, but turning this off has no effect - the dock is positioned centered at the bottom of the screen whatever.

You can edit the launchers by right-clicking them, altering the icon, name and command line options. This can be handy if you want custom icons just for the dock or if the icons are not scaling correctly. This information is stored in a simple XML file at ~/.simdock/launchers.xml.

Features/Applets

There are no applets or additional features - this is after all a simple dock. I couldn’t even find any alternative background images online, although these could probably quite be created in Gimp or Inkscape fairly easily.

Stability/Resource Use

Simdock used about 17MB of RAM. I didn’t encounter any stability issues, save for having to exit and restart the dock for changes to appear. There were a few occasions when I was pinning items and the width of the dock didn’t catch up straight away, leaving half an icon hanging off the screen.

Overall Impressions

Simdock has been around for 7 years and it is showing its age. Having said that, it does what a simple dock should do, much like plank, but with less configurability and can only be positioned on the bottom in the center.

It is fairly light and doesn’t require compositing to provide transparency, so might be worth considering if you want to use a dock with Openbox or some other window manager.

Category	Score /10
Ease of installation	5
Customization	3
Features	3
Stability	7
Overall	5

After a bit of experimentation, I achieved a dock appearance that I was quite happy with using the bg2 background supplied with Simdock:

Copyright (c) RichJack 2014
Written with StackEdit.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.