Is there a good replacement for the Dock?

Question

What are the best dock replacements?

It's frustrating to keep track of windows in the dock unless they're minimized. For instance, I often have 10-15 separate PDF documents open. It's a mess to keep track of them on the dock.

-- Harry Gindi

Answer 1

HyperDock gives you window previews for each running app in the dock, which helps tremendously.

Answer 2

http://brawersoftware.com/products/ubar

I was impressed with this. It is the closest thing to a task bar replacement I found. Some of its behavior annoyed me so I did not purchase it at the end of the trial. You may fare diffently.

The DOCK is rather ill conceived for a variety of reasons, but programs leaving the dock when open is a huge one. Finding open windows is OSX is far more difficult than in Windows. alt-tab > cmd+tab then cmd+~. Seeing the window clearly on the task bar is also nice.

EDIT: I found this forum while looking for a replacement for ubar. I was unable to find one worth a crap. So I ended up buying Ubar, even tho it has some issues. Even with its issues it is better than the dock. The dock is a common complaint for windows users; this isnt a case of stubborn users rejecting change or a different way of doing things. This is a case of the taskbar really being the better way fulfill these functions.

Answer 3

A quasi-replacement worth considering is Quicksilver (download: https://qsapp.com/ and guide: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EBvFUhTqKK4), used by a large number of devout users.

Though, that it depends on what you're looking to replace: access to apps, documents, tasks etc? It should work great. If you want something that looks vaguely like a dock/taskbar/GNOME panel, it won't replace that.

Answer 4

Ubar is very nice. But I don't think it's a dock replacement. Because for me a big job of the dock is the list of icons for my commonly used apps. As far as I can tell, uBar doesn't do that...@Edward

Answer 5

I'm an ActiveDock developer, the application is actively developing, version 2 is now available https://noteifyapp.com/activedock/

Answer 6

System Preferences->Dock: set "minimize windows into application icon".