---
title: "Modern Dock brings a touch of macOS to Windows"
url: https://stacklist.com/card/53aa928e-0538-4ecf-8377-2345e9eb3576
source_url: "https://www.xda-developers.com/modern-dock-brings-touch-macos-windows-actually-looks-good/"
stack: https://stacklist.com/c/technology/stack/bf7ba824-0025-419b-8f5d-40d645a4f580
summary: "Modern Dock is an early-stage GitHub project that provides a floating, translucent, and customizable dock for Windows 11, offering icon management, layout options, and running app indicators. While it looks clean and modern, it currently lacks key features like taskbar replacement, Start menu access, and refined icon scaling."
tags: "windows-customization, dock, windows-11, open-source, taskbar, ui-tools, github"
key_entities: "João Carrasqueira (person), Modern Dock (technology), Windows 11 (technology), XDA (organization), Neowin (organization), ObjectDock (technology), Nexus Dock (technology), Windhawk (technology), Stardock (organization), Reddit (organization), GitHub (organization)"
classification: "analysis"
content_hash: "sha256:3848c7f6517ddc908729641cac829c296edaca2ff472808b315a9eac458b671b"
acp_version: "0.2"
token_counts_approximate: 1358
visibility: public
agent_accessible: true
status: "final"
---

# Modern Dock brings a touch of macOS to Windows

By  João Carrasqueira Published Apr 8, 2026, 2:30 PM EDT João has been covering the tech world for over 7 years, with a heavy focus on laptops and the Windows ecosystem. I also love all things tech and videogames, especially Nintendo, which he's always happy to talk about. Prior to joining XDA in 2021, he worked at Neowin: https://www.neowin.net/news/poster/jo%C3%A3o-carrasqueira/ Sign in to your XDA account There are plenty of ways to customize Windows 11 and make it look exactly how you want, and I've talked quite a few of them, from Windhawk to Stardock's ObjectDock . And actually, ObjectDock was an interesting one in that it has a good idea, but despite being "updated" for Windows 11, it still looks like it comes straight from the mid 2000s. I've even explored other options like Nexus Dock, but it suffers from the same problem. Thankfully, a solution now seems to exist thanks to Modern Dock, an up-and-coming GitHub project I learned about thanks to Reddit. This new tool is the modern implementation of a dock that I would want to have on Windows 11, and it looks great. Though it's still very limited. It looks great A simple, modern look Close Modern Dock is an incredibly simple tool, but it does its main job pretty well. Once it's running, you'll see a floating, translucent dock on your screen, and by going into the app's settings, you can add icons to it, whether it's for a program or a folder, with some system shortcuts also supported, such as the Settings app, Control Panel, or File Explorer. It functions pretty much as intended, and it does so while looking great. There really isn't much to the design of Modern Dock. It's a floating translucent area, and you can customize quite a bit about how it looks. You can change the color of the dock's background, the level of transparency of the background, and the roundness of the corners of the floating area. Plus, you can customize the size of icons on the dock and the spacing between them. You can also move the dock to any edge of the screen and adjust the padding in relation to the screen edge, so there's quite a bit going on already. Actually, you can even set the dock to be "dynamic", meaning you can drag it anywhere on the screen and use it from there. There are a lot of limitations It's still early As much as I do like the idea of Modern Dock, I also find the current implementation to be quite limited in what it can do, which is fair for a relatively new project that has only had two major releases. The first version was released in June 2025, and a major update was launched in March, adding things like running indicators to apps on the dock and the ability to see how many windows are open for a given app. But there's still a lot that I wish was here and isn't. One big thing is that Modern Dock doesn't automatically hide the native Windows taskbar, nor does it try to replace it, seeing as you don't have any other way to access a lot of system icons. You can't open the Start menu, view the current time, or see items in your system tray using just Modern Dock, so the taskbar remaining accessible is kind of a necessity, but I wish that wasn't the case. Having a way to open the Start menu from the dock is essential and what I'd consider the bare minimum here. I've also seen other shell replacement apps that manage to hide the taskbar and generally keep it hidden, so it would be nice if that was possible here and we could still set behaviors like automatically hiding the dock itself. I also find that the app icons are a little too small relative to the size of the dock. You can increase the icon size in the app's settings, but they always look much smaller than the dock, and there isn't much you can do about it. This seems to be accounting for the slight zoom effect that happens you hover over an icon, but I'd prefer if apps were highlighted by a slight hover animation or, if using a zoom effect, by pushing other icons to the side. Additionally, while you can align the dock to the side edges of the screen, it doesn't change orientation, so it's always horizontal. It looks off when aligned to the sides. Hopefully it keeps improving A lot more could be done In addition to some of the more glaring problems above, there's a lot that I think Modern Dock could do to keep improving and become that much more useful. One feature that could be useful would be the ability to create multiple docks that can be placed into each edge of the screen, something akin to what Stardock's ObjectDock does. Since the Dock can be dragged anywhere on the screen, it could also be interesting to have a keyboard shortcut that can summon the dock at any time, maybe placing it next to wherever the mouse cursor is automatically. This would make the app that much more useful for quickly launching apps with a modern look. On the visual side, a blur background effect would also be a great option to have, and it could be even more fun to also have the option to tint app icons in the dock so they have a uniform color, akin to what Apple implemented in macOS Tahoe . With just two major releases in the books, there's no telling how far this app can go, but it's nice to see a more modern dock finally appear on Windows. The current options are functionally sound but they just look out of place today, so this is long overdue, and I recommend checking it out. Cedro Modern Dock See at Github Expand Collapse Close