[CLOSED-Purely Cinnamon related challenge] How to allow Cairo dock to appear on top of Cinnamon task bar?

[RogerWilco]

Hello everybody,

after plenty of web searches and having asked at the glx-dock.org forum as well I decided to try my luck here as I believe that it is a Cinnamon related issue.

It's about:
- LM19 Cinnamon
- Cairo dock 3.4.1

=> The question is: how to get the dock to the top level/layer or how to tell Cinnamon "Hey, the dock is an exception and may overlap with you"?

This is what I seem to be limited to regarding the position of the Cairo dock:

0 pixel offset from screen edge:


With some pixel offset from screen edge:



And this is what I'd like to achieve:

fabricated montage


-> Cinnamon taskbar permanently visible at the bottom of the screen
-> Cairo dock also appearing at the same edge of the screen, showing/hiding when triggered by the mouse pointer but in such a way that the dock appears overlaying/covering/overlapping the Cinnamon taskbar when it appears.

Yes, I want to keep both at the same time - on the same screen edge.
No, I don't want to get rid of the dock by pinning shortcuts to the task bar, hiding the task bar or moving everything to the dock to save me the task bar.

Somehow it has to be possible to bring the Cairo dock to the very front in the desktop environment layer structure, hasn't it?

Thanks.

[RogerWilco]

I had a brief look at the dcon Editor and was made aware of devilspie.
I'm under the impression that those may not "dig" deep enough.

Has anyone with a deeper understanding of Cinnamon than me (which should be easy) ever achieved what I'm trying for?

Or does Cinnamon simply not allow for what I'm trying to achieve?!

[CaptainKirksChair]

I believe the problem lies in that Cinnamon interprets Cairo-Dock as just another application and not something akin to the Cinnamon panel. So your options for the panel are: Always Show, Auto Hide, Intelligently Hide. I tried all three with my implementation of Cairo-Dock and nothing produced what you want. I've even tried to configure Cairo-Dock to always be on top but that is for application windows, not the Cinnamon panel.

I don't think you can do this with a simple configuration change. If this is possible it will most like be some type of coding but I wouldn't know where to begin.

Question: why do you want Cairo-Dock to be on top of the Cinnamon panel? I keep my panel on the top of the screen and Cairo-Dock on the bottom. Works great.

[RogerWilco]

Thanks for your reply CaptainKirksChair.
On the one hand it's good to see that someone else also tried this, on the other hand a pity that thus far no working solution has been found (on this thread?!).

The most honest reason why I'm trying to achieve this setup: force of habit. Yes, as simple and silly as that.

But why I would like to have it with this particular configuration?

• there has "always" been a taskbar in the desktop environments which I used to work with (apart from Win3.1/3.11), I like the concept and don't even use auto-hide for it. With 16:10 aspect ratio monitors I don't even feel like that I sacrifice valuable screen real estate.

• the taskbar permanently visible provides me with information on time, notifications, weather, CPU load, RAM usage, network transfer information and some more which I really like and I keep it relatively slim vertically

• illogically at the same time I want to keep the taskbar "clean" from pinned starters&shortcuts which kind of is a direct contradiction to the previous bullet point - I know - and I prefer to keep the starters/shortcuts to programs and folders in an auto-hiding dock

So I assume that it'd ideally have to be information coming directly from the Cinnamon developers to solve this - or hours of diving into config files, hoping to stumble across something that would do the trick.

[CaptainKirksChair]

• there has "always" been a taskbar in the desktop environments which I used to work with (apart from Win3.1/3.11), I like the concept and don't even use auto-hide for it. With 16:10 aspect ratio monitors I don't even feel like that I sacrifice valuable screen real estate.

I also use a monitor with a 16:10 aspect ratio. And I also like those instant notifications, which is why I moved the Cinnamon panel to the top of the screen and left Cairo-Dock on the bottom. As I write this response, Cairo-Dock has gone into auto-hide mode but the Cinnamon panel on top is visible. If I move my mouse to the bottom, Cairo-Dock appears. Plus the menu is just a quick pull-down click in the upper left of the screen. This configuration may not work for you but is sure does for me.

[bill_steamshovel]

See attached screenshots.

Configure Cairo to use "3D Plane View"

This lifts the icons above the bar on my screen - might get it a bit higher with offset applied.

Whoops cannot post a file greater than 200KB - One out of 3 aint bad - gotta go and learn how to reduce a png file.

Fixed - see attached.

Bill

[RogerWilco]

Hi Bill,

I was this short --> <-- of opening a bottle of champagne; metaphorically speaking.

• I switched to the "3D Plane View" and

• set the "28" pixel offset to "0" which is the value that makes "my" dock's bottom just meet the task bar's top

• hit "apply"

• but unfortunately this didn't pull it to the front, i.e. overlaying/covering the task bar.

So the "3D Plane View" acts like a spacer (adding a few pixels underneath the icons/launchers), which can equally be achieved by increasing the offset from the screen edge under "Position".
Or did I do something wrong and you get it to show up overlaying/covering the taskbar, i.e. like a layer on top of the task bar?

I'll close this thread as I'm more and more getting to the conclusion that it is "purely" a Cinnamon related challenge.

Anyhow, thank you.

Regards
RogerWilco