← Otto User GuideDock

The dock is Otto’s task manager, pinned to one edge of the primary monitor — the bottom by default, or either side. Unlike the top bar and the dynamic island, it is part of the compositor — there is nothing to start.

What it shows

Three groups, in order along the dock (left to right, or top to bottom on a side dock):

Bookmarks — launchers you pinned in the config.
Running applications — one icon each, with a dot beside it on the screen-edge side.
Minimized windows — a thumbnail per minimized window, in a drawer that opens when the first one arrives.

Icons and names come from the application’s .desktop entry, loaded in the background so a slow icon theme never stalls the compositor.

Interacting

Action	Effect
Hover an icon	A label with the app’s name; icons magnify
Click a running app	Raise and focus it
Click it again	Cycle to that app’s next window
Click a bookmark	Focus the running instance, or launch it
Click a minimized window	Restore it with the genie animation
Right-click an icon	Context menu: Open, Keep in Dock, Quit
Drag an icon along the dock	Reorder it; neighbours move out of the way

While a launch is in flight the icon bounces, so you know the click landed before the window shows up.

The dock takes pointer priority over windows underneath it, so clicks near its screen edge always reach the dock rather than the window behind.

Bookmarks

[dock]
bookmarks = [
  { desktop_id = "otto-files.desktop" },
  { desktop_id = "firefox.desktop", label = "Private", exec_args = ["--private-window"] },
  { desktop_id = "otto-settings.desktop" },
]

Field	Meaning
`desktop_id`	The `.desktop` file name. Required.
`label`	Override the tooltip text. Optional.
`exec_args`	Extra arguments appended to the entry’s `Exec` line. Optional.

Find desktop ids with ls /usr/share/applications ~/.local/share/applications.

Bookmarks behave exactly like running apps once launched — same icon, same hover, same window cycling.

Pinning and reordering without the config file

Right-click any icon — a bookmark or a running app that is not yet in the dock — and pick Keep in Dock to pin it; the same entry, ticked, unpins it again. The menu also offers Open (for an app that is not running) and Quit (for one that is).

Drag an icon along the dock to reorder it. The icons it passes shuffle aside so the order you are about to commit is visible before you let go, and a press that does not move still launches or focuses the app.

Both are written back to bookmarks in your config, so the dock comes back the same way next login.

Appearance and behaviour

[dock]
size = 1.0             # overall size multiplier, 0.5 – 2.0
position = "bottom"    # "bottom", "left" or "right"
magnification = true   # macOS-style icon magnification on hover
autohide = false       # hide when the pointer leaves
genie_scale = 0.5      # how much icons magnify under the pointer
genie_span = 10.0      # falloff: larger = tighter around the pointer

Position

position picks the screen edge the dock is docked to: "bottom" (the default), "left" or "right". A side dock stacks its icons vertically, reserves screen width instead of height, magnifies along the pointer’s vertical travel, shows its tooltips beside the icons, and minimizes windows sideways into itself.

You can also change it while Otto runs: right-click the dock handle (the grip between the apps and the minimized windows) and pick Bottom, Left or Right. The choice is written back to the config.

Size

size scales the whole dock. 0.5 is half-height, 2.0 is double. Icon sizes, padding and the bar height all follow. It takes effect immediately, whether it is changed from Settings, by dragging the dock handle, or in the config file.

Only size, position, autohide, magnification and bookmarks are ever written back by the dock itself; everything else in [dock] stays exactly as you typed it. Older builds rewrote the whole table instead, leaving a copy of every value in ~/.config/otto/config.toml — which then shadowed /etc/otto/config.toml and made editing the system config look like it did nothing. Otto never edits that file for you: at startup it logs a warning naming the leftover keys, and you delete the lines you did not write. It cannot tell a copied colorize_intensity = 1.0 from one you typed, and guessing wrong would silently turn a setting off.

Magnification

Icons grow as the pointer approaches, with a Gaussian falloff — the icon under the pointer is largest and neighbours taper off. genie_scale is how much the icon under the pointer grows; genie_span is how sharply the curve falls off, so a larger value keeps the bump tighter around the pointer and a smaller one spreads it over more neighbours. Both apply live.

Set magnification = false for a flat dock with no hover scaling.

Auto-hide

With autohide = true the dock slides away when the pointer leaves and comes back when the pointer enters the hot zone along the screen edge it lives on.

Icon colorization

[dock]
colorize_icons = true
colorize_color = "#ffffff"
colorize_intensity = 1.0

Tints every app icon toward a single colour — a monochrome dock. intensity blends between the original icon (0.0) and the flat tint (1.0). The tint follows the icons wherever they appear, so the app switcher matches the dock. All three keys apply live, so dragging the tint strength in Settings repaints the icons as you drag.

If you want the tint on the dock but not on the cmd-tab panel, opt the switcher out:

[appswitcher]
colorize_icons = false

That is only a yes-or-no for the switcher: the colour and strength stay in [dock], since one desktop has one icon tint. With dock.colorize_icons = false there is no tint anywhere, so the key does nothing. The dock’s drag ghost is part of the dock and follows the dock’s setting. This key applies live too.

Badges and progress

An icon can carry a small badge in its corner — a count drawn over the icon — and a progress bar across its foot.

Badges are how unread notifications show up: otto-islands is the session’s notification daemon, so it is the only thing that knows how many notifications an application still has outstanding, and it publishes that count to the dock. The badge is attached to the sending application’s icon even when that app is not in the dock yet. Notifications that arrive without a desktop-entry hint (one forwarded from a terminal escape sequence, for instance) are attributed by resolving the sending process to its desktop entry.

Dismissing the notifications clears the badge. Both the badge and the progress bar scale with the icon, so they follow magnification.

Visuals

The dock bar uses background blur and picks its colours from the active theme, so it follows your light/dark setting. See Theming.

It hides automatically when a window goes fullscreen, and when exposé opens.

Multi-monitor

The dock lives on the primary monitor only. A per-monitor dock is not implemented.

The primary monitor is the first physical output brought up, or whichever display profile sets primary = true — see Display.

Not yet supported

Bookmarked folders and locations
Dragging an application into the dock from outside it (the Files window, a launcher result) — pinning is the context menu’s job
A per-monitor dock