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Plank is a new dock written in Vala. It's a Docky team project and it will be the default launcher in the new elementary OS "Luna".


Cassidy James, one of the elementary OS team members has published a theme for Plank to go with Pantheon, the elementary OS desktop environment:

Plank Pantheon theme

That looks a lot like Docky, doesn't it?


Here's how the default Plank theme looks like:

Plank original theme


Plank is not stable and it's nowhere near feature complete, but if you want to install it already, there's a testing PPA you can use:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ricotz/docky
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install plank


And another tip for Plank, also from Cassidy James: if you want to get a "folder" in Plank like you can see in the screenshots above (the one Firefox, UMPlayer, Wuala and Marlin), go to ~/.config/plank/launchers, create a new .dockitem and point it to a folder with .desktop files inside.

Download Pantheon theme for Plank - to use, extract the contents to ~/.config/plank/theme, replacing the original files (make a backup first).

elementary OS "Luna" sounds pretty exiting already, and it gets more interesting by the day. For instance, a new project was registered on Launchpad yesterday for a new terminal written in Vala, designed especially for elementary OS.

Oh, and speaking of elementary OS, the elementaryos.org website was redesigned, getting some new sections like a Developer Journal, Answers, etc so check it out!