Shorten Dock Panel & Move ‘Show Applications’ to Top in Ubuntu 24.04 | 22.04

Last updated: May 5, 2024

After installed the new Ubuntu 22.04 and Ubuntu 24.04, one of the top things to do is tweaking the left dock panel.

Via “System Settings -> Appearance”, you may change the panel position to bottom, adjust icon size, and enable auto-hide. However, the 9 dots ‘Show Applications’ (or ‘Show Apps’) icon sticks to the bottom which is not movable.

Move ‘Show Applications’ button to the Top:

Though you can not drag moving the icon, Ubuntu has hidden option to change the position. And you may run single command in terminal to do the trick.

Press Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard to open terminal. When it opens, paste the command below and hit Enter:

gsettings set org.gnome.shell.extensions.dash-to-dock show-apps-at-top true

The icon goes to top (or left if you moved dock to bottom) immediately after running the command. So it will look like:

Shorten the Dock Panel:

The dock launcher is easy to move to the bottom, but Appearance setting does not has option to make it compact, so to have Mac OS style short bottom panel.

To shorten Ubuntu Dock, press Ctrl+Alt+T to open terminal and run command:

gsettings set org.gnome.shell.extensions.dash-to-dock extend-height false

After that, it will look like:

Configure Ubuntu Dock via Dconf Editor:

For those hate Linux commands, there’s an advanced configuration tool ‘Dconf Editor’ available to do the trick.

Search for and install the tool from Ubuntu Software if you don’t have it.

Next, open Dconf Editor by searching from activities overview screen. Then navigate to “org/gnome/shell/extensions/dash-to-dock“. There you’ll see a list of options to configure the dock panel, including moving ‘Show Applications’, ‘extend-height’, ‘click to minimize’, and more.

That’s all. Enjoy!

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I'm a freelance blogger who started using Ubuntu in 2007 and wishes to share my experiences and some useful tips with Ubuntu beginners and lovers. Please comment to let me know if the tutorial is outdated! And, notify me if you find any typo/grammar/language mistakes. English is not my native language. Contact me via [email protected] Buy me a coffee: Buymeacoffee | https://ko-fi.com/ubuntuhandbook1 |

4 responses to Shorten Dock Panel & Move ‘Show Applications’ to Top in Ubuntu 24.04 | 22.04

  1. This is great. Thank you so much!

  2. Hey Jim,
    So, I have this problem. Some of the applications like Telegram, Slack, would show at the top after closing them but since the 21.10 update they were not showing anywhere after closing, but I know they were still running cause I can hear the notification sounds but no way to open them. Please let me if you know any fixes for this.

  3. The Terminal commands do not work on Ubuntu 20.04. I had to use the Dconf Editor. I prefer the Terminal commands. Is there an update to the Terminal commands so it works in Ubuntu 20.04?

    Thanks for this information!

    • The commands should work on Ubuntu 20.04+ including 22.04. Check if there’s typo before running it, or if it output any error?