An enhanced GNOME Shell desktop dash, implemented as a GNOME Shell extension.

Released on GNOME Extensions.

Em—Dash's primary function is to move the dash out of the overview and into the top panel or dock it on an edge of one of the monitors.

Also, Em—Dash provides the following optional features for the icons:

• Handle any number of icons: when there are too many, it will let you scroll through them. (The built-in dash keeps shrinking the icons in order to fit more, until it reaches a minimum icon size and then stops showing extra icons).
• Show windows from all of the workspaces (like the built-in dash) or only from the current workspace.
• Highlight the currently focused application with a color-appropriate backlight (a feature borrowed from the Unity desktop).
• Indicate how many windows are open using a dotted line (the built-in dash only shows a full line if any are open).
• Move the activities button from the top panel to the dash.
• Change the behavior of left-click and middle-click on the dash icons: launch (like the built-in dash), launch/hide, or cycle/hide.
• Mouse wheel scroll to cycle windows on the dash icons.
• Show a window list or window previews when hovering over dash icons (a feature borrowed from the Windows desktop; the built-in dash only shows the application name when hovering).
• Allow icons to "grab" other windows. This solves a common annoyance with the built-in dash, in which poorly designed applications spawn extra icons for their windows. This feature even works for WINE applications.

Optional features for the dash icons' popup menus:

• Show media controls for supported applications (MPRIS).
• Move the application menu from the top panel into the relevant icon's popup menu.

Requires GNOME Shell 3.24 and above. Written in ECMAScript 6 (2015).

The em dash is the longest version of the typographic dash. Hilariously, the "Em—Dash" name is stylized with an em dash inside of it.

You can install the extension for the current user like so:

git clone https://github.com/tliron/em-dash.git
cd em-dash
make link

You will then need to restart GNOME Shell and enable the extension via GNOME Tweak.

To update the extension to the latest, run git pull in the em-dash directory and restart GNOME Shell.

To uninstall, run make unlink in the em-dash directory and restart GNOME Shell.

Found a bug? Please report the issue immediately!

Em—Dash has a deliberately extensible model-view architecture, and the utils package as a lot of general-purpose code that can be reused in other GNOME Shell extensions.

We owe a debt to the developers of Dash-to-Dock and Dash-to-Panel. There was much to learn from their code.

Let's make GNOME better, together!

To run make, you might need to install these dependencies (this is for Ubuntu):

sudo apt install make zip gettext intltool libglib2.0-bin

It is recommended to test in a virtual machine running GNOME, so as not to break your dev environment while you work. Note, though, that St CSS animations will not work unless you have 3D enabled, so you may want to make sure your virtual guest supports 3D.

To enable logging:

gsettings set org.gnome.shell.extensions.em-dash debug true

You need to restart GNOME Shell for logs to begin. See the logs with journalctl. You can filter specifically for the extension, e.g.:

journalctl -f -o cat GNOME_SHELL_EXTENSION_NAME="Em-Dash"

Unfortunately, this will not show uncaught exceptions, which are logged by gjs (GNOME JavaScript):

journalctl -f GLIB_DOMAIN=Gjs

To see all GNOME Shell messages, not just from JavaScript:

journalctl -f _COMM=gnome-shell

Well, that's except for messages from prefs are found in the extension manager (!):

journalctl -f _COMM=gnome-shell-ext

So, in the end it might make more sense to just view all journal messages and ignore the noise.

If you've just started developing GNOME extensions, you will be overwhelmed. Here's some important reference material:

• The GNOME Shell JavaScript source code is crucial. This is where your imports.ui come from. imports.misc is in the same repository as is the default CSS.
• The general imports (imports.lang, imports.gettext, imports.tweener) come from the gjs source code.
• All the imports.gi come from the GObject-Introspection system, which uses language-neutral descriptors for installed GObject libraries. (On Ubuntu, you can find the automatically-generated descriptors in /usr/share/gir-1.0/ and compiled ones in /usr/lib/girepository-1.0/ and /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/girepository-1.0/.) The implication is that imports.gi source code is almost always in C. Here's documentation for the most common ones you will use:
  • imports.gi.Shell is the part of GNOME Shell written in C.
  • imports.gi.Clutter is Clutter, the UI library for the shell. It's a powerful foundation built on top of OpenGL.
  • imports.gi.St is St, a CSS-styled widget toolkit built for Clutter (this is what a "GNOME Shell theme" is for). Note that in terms of variety of widgets, St is currently nowhere as rich as GTK+ is.
  • imports.gi.Meta is actually Mutter, an abstraction above the compositing window manager, such as Metacity. (That's likely the source of the "Meta" name.)
  • GSettings are part of imports.gi.Gio. You'll also see some documentation there for the XML format for the /schemas/ files. The type fields use GLib's GVariant format.
• Though Clutter supports animations, the GNOME Shell code tends to prefer its own gjs tweener implementation (based on this API).
• The preferences page is quite different from all the above, as it's actually a GTK+ widget. The Glade designer can be used to edit the prefs.ui file used by the GTK+ builder. This documentation is useful.

• Support dock on different monitors
• Dock with borders seems to keep moving its strut by a pixel or two as app focus changes

• In touch-to-show, make sure dock is shown in overview
• Bottom dash on overview might cover some UI elements

• Dragging on empty dash
• Drag and drop mangles clipping
• Can't scroll during drag and drop
• Support scrolling in smaller increments

• Window list
• Window previews

• Popup menu can be too big to fit small screens