Crystal Dock (Hard Fork)

This is a hard fork of Crystal Dock by Viet Dang. The original project is an excellent Wayland dock for Linux with parabolic zooming and multiple visual styles.

What This Fork Improves

• App-specific right-click menus -- Right-clicking a dock icon shows the application's context menu with desktop actions (New Window, New Tab, New Private Window, etc.), window list, and pin/close options, similar to KDE Plasma's task manager
• Shift+Right-click for dock settings -- The panel settings menu is accessible via Shift+Right-click, keeping plain right-click for the app menu
• Drag-to-reorder pinned launchers -- Hold and drag pinned launcher icons to rearrange them with smooth animated icon sliding and parabolic zoom following the cursor, like macOS
• Configurable bounce animation -- Choose how many times icons bounce when launching an application
• Fixed pill resizing -- The dock background pill correctly resizes when items are added or removed
• Glow effect on task indicators -- Active/running task indicator dots have a glow effect with optional breathing animation (Animated Indicator setting)
• Improved settings -- Better organized and more accessible settings dialogs
• Smooth enter/leave animations -- Parabolic zoom ramps up smoothly on hover entry instead of popping in instantly
• Smooth task add/remove animations -- Dock pill resizes smoothly with fade in/out when windows open or close
• Slide-to-hide animation -- Auto-hide slides the dock off-screen instead of snapping it away

Enabling Blur on the Dock

Crystal Dock does not handle blur on its own. For blur behind the dock panel, it is recommended to use Better Blur DX (a KWin effect for KDE Plasma).

To set it up:

1. Install Better Blur DX
2. In Better Blur DX settings, set the mode to Blur all except matching
3. Add crystal-dock to the Force blur list

This will give you a blurred translucent dock background.

Dependencies

Crystal Dock is written in C++ and depends on:

• Qt6 (base, DBus, Gui, Widgets)
• LayerShellQt6
• Wayland client libraries
• KF6WindowSystem

Installing build dependencies

Arch Linux:

pacman -S qt6-base wayland layer-shell-qt kwindowsystem

Fedora:

dnf install qt6-qtbase-private-devel wayland-devel layer-shell-qt-devel kf6-kwindowsystem-devel

Ubuntu:

apt install qt6-base-private-dev libwayland-dev liblayershellqtinterface-dev libkf6windowsystem-dev

openSUSE:

zypper install qt6-base-private-devel wayland-devel layer-shell-qt6-devel kf6-kwindowsystem-devel

Installation

Quick install (build + install + restart)

./install.sh

This builds a Release binary, copies it to /usr/bin/crystal-dock, and starts the dock.

Manual build

cmake -S src -B build -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr
cmake --build build --parallel
sudo cmake --install build

Then launch from the application menu (Utilities) or from the terminal:

crystal-dock

Uninstall

sudo cmake --build build --target uninstall

License

Crystal Dock is licensed under the GNU General Public License v3.0.