cairo-dock (1) Linux Manual Page
NAME
cairo-dock – A dock to launch your programs easily.
SYNOPSIS
cairo-dock [options]
DESCRIPTION
Cairo-Dock is a pretty, light and convenient interface to your desktop, able to replace advantageously your system panel!
It features multi-docks, taskbar, launchers and a lot of useful applets.
Applets can be detached from the dock to act as desktop widgets.
Numerous ready-to-use themes are downloadable in 1 click, and can be easily customized at your convenience.
It can use hardware acceleration (OpenGL) to be very fast and low on CPU.
It’s recommended to install the PLUG-INS package ( cairo-dock-plug-ins ) to have access to more views, dialogues and many plug-ins and applets.
Some screenshots are available :
Development site:
OPTIONS
You can launch Cairo-Dock with several options :
(Note : you can use these options in one block. For example : cairo-dock -oia )
-c, –cairo- Force Cairo backend. Use this option if you have issue with the OpenGL mode.
-o, –opengl- Force OpenGL backend. Cairo-Dock with OpenGL/Hardware acceleration.
-O, –indirect-opengl- Use OpenGL backend with indirect rendering. There are very few case where this option should be used.
-A, –ask-backend- Ask again on startup which backend to use.
-l, –log [option]- Log verbosity (options : debug, message, warning, critical, error – default is ‘warning’).
For example : cairo-dock -l debug -F, –colors- Force to display some output messages with colors even if these messages are not displayed into a tty.
-w, –wait- Wait for N seconds before starting. This is useful if you notice some problems when the dock starts with the session.
-a, –keep-above- Force to keep the dock above other windows.
-s, –no-sticky- Don’t make the dock appear on all desktops.
-e, –env- Force the dock to consider this environment (gnome, xfce, etc.) – it may crash the dock if not set properly.
-d, –dir- Force the dock to load the configuration in this directory (default is ~/.config/cairo-dock).
-m, –maintenance- Allow to edit the config before the dock is started and show the config panel on startup.
-x, –exclude- Exclude a given plug-in from activating (it is still loaded though).
-f, –safe-mode- Don’t load any plug-ins and show the theme manager on startup.
-W, –metacity-workaround- Work around some bugs in Metacity Window-Manager (invisible dialogs or sub-docks)
-M, –modules-dir- Ask the dock to load additional modules contained in this directory (though it is unsafe for your dock to load unofficial modules).
-T, –testing- For debugging purpose only. The crash manager will not be started to hunt down the bugs.
-E, –easter-eggs- For debugging purpose only. Some hidden and still unstable options will be activated.
-S, –server- Address of a server containing additional themes. This will overwrite the default server address.
-k, –locked- Lock the dock so that any modification is impossible for users.
OTHER
Some other options with an output in the terminal :
-v, –version- Print version and quit.
-h, –help- Show the help and quit.
-C, –capuccino- Cairo-Dock makes anything, including coffee !
FILES
~/.config/cairo-dock/- Your config files are saved in this repertory. You can use ‘-d’ option to change it.
/usr/share/cairo-dock/- Data files for Cairo-Dock.
/usr/lib/cairo-dock/- Binary files for Cairo-Dock and its plug-ins.
AUTHOR
Most of the Cairo-Dock project was written by Fabrice Rey (fabounet) <fabounet [at] glx-dock.org>.
The Cairo-Dock Team is currently formed by Fabounet (Fabrice Rey) and Matttbe (Matthieu Baerts).
With the help of Eduardo Mucelli for our third-party applets.
Thanks to our former developers: Mav (Yann Sladek), Tofe (Christophe Chapuis), Nochka85 (Yann Dulieu), ChanGFu (Rémy Robertson), Paradoxxx Zero (Florian Mounier), Necropotame (Adrien Pilleboue), Rom1 (Romain Perol), Ctaf , Augur and SQP as well as numerous beta testers and contributors: lylambda, taiebot65, Franksuse64, ppmt, etc. see the ‘About’ menu in the dock and this web page.
Don’t hesitate to contribute to this project ;)
Please have a look at this wiki page:
This manual page was started by Julien Lavergne <julien.lavergne [at] gmail.com>, for the Debian project (but may be used by others).
Updated by Matthieu Baerts (matttbe) <matttbe [at] gmail.com>.
BUGS
Your bug is maybe a recurrent problem (black background, window at startup (use -c or -o), problem with OpenGL, etc.). Please go to:
For any other bugs, you can post them on Cairo-Dock forum:
or on Launchpad