DockView started as one thing: hover a Dock icon, see your windows. Version 2.1.7 keeps that untouched and adds three things around it — all of them about reaching what you need without leaving the Dock.
🔥 An apps folder that lives in the Dock
macOS gives you one way to keep a lot of apps at hand: pile them into the Dock until the icons shrink to nothing. DockView 2.1.7 adds another. A single DockView icon sits in your Dock, and clicking it opens a panel with the apps you chose to put there.
Launch one and focus goes straight back to whatever you were doing — the panel does not steal your place. You fill the list yourself in Settings → Dock Panel: drag apps in from the Finder, or add them with +. The icon is drawn as a folder full of apps, so it reads as a folder and not as one more running program.
It is off by default. Turn it on in Settings → System → Show icon in Dock.
A click on a Dock icon that finally does something 🤔
Click the icon of an app that is already in front and macOS does nothing at all. That click has been free real estate for years, and now you can spend it.
Settings → Dock → Click on Dock Icon gives you three choices: leave it as it is, hide the app the way ⌘H does, or walk through that app’s windows one click at a time. Hold ⇧ Shift while clicking to include minimized windows in the walk.
It only applies to the app you are working in right now. Clicking any other icon still just switches to it, exactly as before.
🔥 Dock number badges, in your colours
Numbered Dock shortcuts arrived earlier: hold the modifier, your icons get numbers, press one and you are there. In 2.1.7 they stopped looking like a debug overlay.
Badges now follow your system accent colour or any of the eight macOS colours, come in three sizes, and sit in whichever corner of the icon you like. They scale together with the icon, so Dock magnification no longer shrinks them into dots. You can also number only the apps that are actually running, or count from the right end of the Dock.
Smaller things
Window control buttons on a thumbnail can now be hidden entirely — Preview → Window Control Buttons → Hidden — if you would rather see the window and nothing else. That setting also moved from the Dock tab to Preview, where it belongs. And the menu bar icon gained a Documentation item.
Where to read the details
Every setting mentioned here — and the ones that did not fit — is written up in the DockView documentation. It is a single page, so ⌘F works.
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Thank you for using DockView 💪