Enhanced Dock Preview with Window Actions and Notification Badges

[deluca0206]

Description

Improve the Dock by adding interactive window previews and notification badges, providing a more modern and productive user experience similar to Windows and KDE Plasma.

Motivation

The current Dock provides quick access to applications but lacks contextual information and window management capabilities. Adding window previews with quick actions and notification badges would improve usability, multitasking, and accessibility without requiring users to switch windows.

Related Module

Dock

Alternatives Considered

1. Window Preview

When hovering over a running application in the Dock, display a preview popup containing:

• Live thumbnail(s) of all open windows.
• Window title(s).
• Ability to click a preview to focus the window.
• Close window action.
• Minimize window action.
  (Make it optional for the user)

2. Notification Badges

Display notification counters directly on Dock icons for applications that support unread notifications or window oppened.

Examples:

• Discord (3)
• Telegram (12)
• Thunderbird (5)
  (Make it optional for the user)

Additional Context

Benefits:
Faster window switching.
Easier management of multiple windows.
Better visibility of unread notifications.
More polished desktop experience.
Feature parity with other modern desktop environments while maintaining Aurora Shell's design language.

[leandromqrs]

After looking further into the available GNOME and Wayland infrastructure, the two requested features should be evaluated separately.

For window previews, Aurora Shell does not need to use the ScreenCast portal or implement an external Wayland capture client. Because Aurora runs inside GNOME Shell, it can use GNOME Shell’s native Shell.WindowPreviewLayout, which is implemented in C and creates live clones directly from a window’s compositor actor. This avoids PipeWire, portal permission dialogs and CPU-side screen copies while keeping the rendering inside Mutter’s scene graph.

Rather than porting the full Dash to Dock (https://github.com/micheleg/dash-to-dock/blob/master/windowPreview.js) or Dash to Panel (https://github.com/home-sweet-gnome/dash-to-panel/blob/master/src/windowPreview.js) implementation, we could build a small Aurora-specific popup around Shell.WindowPreviewLayout (https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/-/blob/main/src/shell-window-preview-layout.c), adding only the title and window actions. The preview actors should only exist while the popup is visible to keep the GPU and lifecycle overhead low.

There is also ongoing work on native external Wayland capture through ext-image-capture-source-v1 (https://wayland.app/protocols/ext-image-capture-source-v1) and ext-image-copy-capture-v1 (https://wayland.app/protocols/ext-image-copy-capture-v1). These protocols were added through wayland-protocols!124 (https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/merge_requests/124), with further work such as explicit GPU synchronization (https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/merge_requests/506) still in progress. However, Mutter does not currently expose this path, and there is no confirmed GNOME release timeline for it.

Notification counters are a different matter. Counting GNOME notifications would not reliably represent an application’s actual unread count, so we should avoid presenting that as an exact badge. There is currently no standard Freedesktop badge API; the Notification Portal v2 discussion (flatpak/xdg-desktop-portal#983) explicitly excludes unseen-notification badges. Related work is being tracked in GNOME Shell #511 (https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/-/work_items/511) and Electron #51668 (electron/electron#51668), but neither currently provides a portable numeric counter API.

My suggestion is therefore to keep the native window-preview portion under consideration, while deferring numeric notification badges until a reliable application-provided standard exists. An exact open-window counter or a non-numeric attention indicator could be considered separately.