A while back we've posted about a "show desktop" icon for the Unity launcher. But if you need more space on the Unity launcher or have autohide turned on, you may find it more convenient to access this from the panel so WebUpd8 reader Mark Bokil converted the "show desktop" Unity icon to an Ubuntu indicator.

Currently there's no "Show desktop" applet / icon for the Unity panel in Ubuntu 11.04 and while you can use Super + D to toggle Show Desktop, many are used to using an icon for this. So here's how to get such an icon on your Unity panel.

Update: Docky now has it's own "Show Desktop" applet, but Docky and Gnome DO are separate applications for a while and a lot of people are still using the old Docky integrated into Gnome DO, so this should still be useful.

I know a lot of you are using Gnome Do for quite some time, but I've only recently switched to it. One of the most annoying things when running it in Docky mode (Dock bar) is that it doesn't have to many applets, and I can live with that but now without a "Show Desktop" shortcut.

Yes, you can use a keyboard shortcut for showing the desktop, but I wanted this in Gnome Do / Docky and managed to create an applet (actually a script) to use in Docky.

The main challenge was to find a way to show / hide the windows from within a terminal. Then I found wmctrl, a tool which can hide / restore your windows from the command line.

The following instructions are for Ubuntu / Gnome, but should work for other Linux distributions / desktop environments too.