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Dock Applet is a new MATE Panel applet which displays running applications/windows as icons, unlike the default Window List applet which displays the app icon as well as the window title.

MATE Panel Dock Applet

The application is only 10 days old and it doesn't have too many features, but it's already usable. Right now, it supports pinning/unpinning applications, displays an indicator under the icon for running applications (with configurable color for light and dark panels) and allows moving items via right click > move left/right.

Also, the app honours the panel transparency and background settings, so it it should be compatible with any theme or any MATE panel customizations (including using it with a vertical panel).

In this very early development stages, the application doesn't support themes, there's no multi-monitor support and it doesn't indicate if there are multiple windows of the same app. Update: the app was updated and it can now indicate when there are multiple windows of the same app (for up to 4 windows).

Also, switching between multiple windows of the same app could use some work because right now, you can only do this by right clicking on the icon and selecting a window.

Even though it needs work, I'm sure some MATE users will appreciate this small applet and maybe even help improve it, especially since other similar solutions (like the DockBarX MATE Panel applet which apparently can't be ported to the latest MATE, at least in its current state) don't work with recent MATE versions.


Install Dock Applet in Ubuntu MATE or Linux Mint MATE


To make it easier to install, I uploaded Dock Applet to the WebUpd8 MATE/TopMenu PPA. To install the applet in Ubuntu MATE or Linux Mint, use the following commands:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:webupd8team/mate
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install mate-dock-applet

Update: Ubuntu MATE 16.04 users can install the applet from the official repositories, but it's an older version:
sudo apt-get install mate-dock-applet

Update 2: the Ubuntu 16.10 Yakkety Yak package from our PPA is built with GTK3 (and so is MATE in Ubuntu 16.10, so this was required to get the applet to work).

Arch Linux users can install Dock Applet via AUR.

Once installed, right click on the panel, select "Add to panel" and add Dock Applet.

To download the source code, report bugs or help improve Dock Applet, see its GitHub page.