Dockyard

A themeable desktop dock for Windows. Drop apps on it, they become tiles.
Hover and they magnify, and the row spreads apart to make room.

Download the latest release →

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What it does

• Drop an app on it. .exe, Start-menu shortcut, folder, document, or a URL dragged straight from the address bar. Shortcuts are resolved to their real target, arguments and working directory, and it picks up the shortcut's own custom icon if it has one.
• Sharp icons at any size. Pulled from the shell's 256px jumbo cache, so they hold up when scaled instead of going crunchy like classic desktop icons.
• Magnification that behaves like a dock. A gaussian falloff scales the icons near your cursor, and the row re-spreads around them so grown neighbours slide out of each other's way rather than overlapping.
• Sits below your windows. Off the taskbar, out of Alt+Tab, and clicking a tile won't steal focus or raise the dock over what you're doing.
• Remembers where it is, across a reboot and a launch-at-login.
• Nine themes, or build your own with a full colour editor.

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Themes

Obsidian Near-black, barely-there edge	Graphite Warm grey, soft and matte	Frost Pale glass, cool highlight
Nord Polar night, muted blue	Dune Warm sand on charcoal	Ink Deep indigo, dusk violet
Moss Forest grey, sage accent	Porcelain Light, for pale wallpapers	Custom Whatever you make

They're deliberately quiet — a near-neutral slab and one restrained accent. A dock sits over your wallpaper all day; it shouldn't compete with it.

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Settings

Right click the dock → Settings…. Every change applies to the live dock as you make it, and there isn't a stock Windows control anywhere in it.

Each preset swatch is a miniature of the dock rather than a colour chip, so you can see what you're picking before you pick it.

Six colour roles — slab, outline, accent, label, hover plate, shadow — each tunable by hue, saturation, brightness and alpha, or by typing a hex value. Every track previews its own axis: the saturation ramp shows that colour at every saturation, the alpha track fades over a checkerboard.

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Install

Two options on the latest release — take either:

• Dockyard.exe — portable. Download, run, done. Nothing installed, nothing left behind, and it happily lives on a USB stick.
• DockyardSetup.exe — installer. Adds a Start-menu entry and an uninstaller. Installs per-user, so no admin rights.

Then drag an app onto the dock.

To remove it later, Uninstall-Dockyard.bat is on the same release page. It handles either install route, shows you what it found before touching anything, and keeps your settings unless you tell it not to.

If the release says the exe is standalone, it needs nothing else at all. Otherwise it wants the .NET Desktop Runtime 8 or newer, which most Windows machines already have — grab it from dotnet.microsoft.com/download if the dock doesn't appear.

Settings live in %APPDATA%\Dockyard\config.json. Put a config.json next to the exe instead and it runs portable — the whole thing works off a USB stick.

Start with Windows: Settings → Behaviour → Start with Windows. Per-user, no admin rights, and it shows up in Task Manager's Startup tab like anything else.

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Using it

Action	How
Add an app	Drag an .exe, shortcut, folder or file onto the dock
Add a website	Drag a URL from your browser's address bar onto the dock
Launch	Left click a tile
Reorder	Click and drag a tile sideways
Move the dock	Drag the empty slab — it snaps to screen edges and the centre
Resize icons	Ctrl + scroll over the dock
Tile options	Right click a tile — rename, change icon, arguments, run as admin, remove
Everything else	Right click the slab → Settings

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Known limits

• Show Desktop hides it. That feature minimises every top-level window and the dock is one. There's an experimental Glued layer mode that tries to make the dock a child of the desktop to dodge this; it doesn't work on every Windows build, and it costs the acrylic backdrop.
• Acrylic pins the corner radius. The blurred backdrops hand the surface to Windows, which blurs the whole window rectangle and forces its own corner radius. The default None backdrop is drawn by the app, so corners are exact at any radius.

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Building it yourself

Needs the .NET SDK 8 or newer. No NuGet packages to restore — the project has zero dependencies beyond the framework itself.

git clone https://github.com/ZenCodeOrSomeShit/dockyard
cd dockyard/src
dotnet run

For a release build, one standalone file with the runtime bundled in:

dotnet publish Dockyard.csproj -c Release -r win-x64 --self-contained true ^
  -p:PublishSingleFile=true -p:IncludeNativeLibrariesForSelfExtract=true ^
  -p:EnableCompressionInSingleFile=true -o out

Or a small one that uses the .NET runtime already on the machine:

dotnet publish Dockyard.csproj -c Release -r win-x64 --self-contained false ^
  -p:PublishSingleFile=true -o out

If you get NU1100, the project is targeting a .NET band you don't have installed and NuGet is trying to download its targeting packs. Add -p:TargetFramework=netX.0-windows matching your SDK — check with dotnet --version.

installer/Dockyard.iss builds the installer with Inno Setup once out/Dockyard.exe exists.

Layout

src/
  App.xaml(.cs)             single-instance guard, respawn, context-menu styling
  MainWindow.xaml(.cs)      the dock — magnification, drag, drop, z-order
  SettingsWindow.xaml(.cs)  settings UI; panes are built in code
  PromptWindow.cs           small themed text prompt (WPF ships no InputBox)
  Themes/Controls.xaml      hand-templated sliders, switches, segments, fields
  Models/                   DockConfig, DockItem
  Services/
    ConfigService.cs        JSON load/save, theme presets, migration, crash guard
    ColorUtil.cs            hex / RGB / HSV conversion and the slider ramps
    StartupService.cs       the per-user launch-at-login registry entry
  Interop/
    Native.cs               acrylic, monitor geometry, z-order, desktop reparenting
    IconExtractor.cs        256px shell icons via IShellItemImageFactory
    ShortcutResolver.cs     .lnk and .url parsing via IShellLinkW

Most of the interesting problems live in Interop/ and in the z-order handling in MainWindow.xaml.cs — the comments there explain why things are done the way they are rather than the obvious way, which is usually because the obvious way doesn't work.

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Built with WPF on .NET. No NuGet packages — just the framework and a fair amount of Win32.

Written by ZenCodeOrSomeShit, pair-programmed with Claude.

MIT licensed — see LICENSE.