Spotlight › Dock

Room to work on a 200-line screen

The dock is the strip of tiles for your open programs. It used to sit along the bottom of the screen, always. Now it can stand on the left or right edge, or hide to a single line. On a CGA screen, that gives a window 23 more rows out of 200.

rows given back on CGA
23 of 200
files in the same window
4, then 6
edges
bottom, left, right
Before and after Get the images
Dock
The os8088 desktop on a CGA screen with the Control Panel open on its Dock page: radio buttons for Bottom, Left and Right with Bottom chosen, an Auto-hide check box, and the dock along the bottom of the screen holding one tile.
The Dock page of the Control Panel. Pick an edge, tick Auto-hide, and the desktop rearranges itself on the spot. The choice is kept for the next start.

What the dock is

And why its size matters more on some screens than others.

Every program you open in os8088 gets a tile in the dock. Click a tile to bring that window to the front. A window you minimize disappears into its tile, and the tile is the way to get it back.

os8088 runs on three kinds of graphics card. A VGA, from 1987, gives it 640 by 480 pixels. A CGA -- IBM's Color Graphics Adapter from 1981, the card in the original IBM PC -- gives it 640 by 200, in black and white. Width is the same on both. Height is not.

The dock is 24 pixels tall. On a VGA that is 5 per cent of the screen. On a CGA it is 12 per cent, and together with the menu bar across the top, 44 of the 200 rows were spoken for before any window opened. Every text editor, file list and spreadsheet on a CGA machine was working in what was left.

Before and after

The same window, zoomed to fill the screen, on the same CGA machine.

Before
A CGA screen with a file window named APPS zoomed to fill the space above the dock. It lists the parent folder and four files: ARTFUL.O88, AUDIO.O88, BROWSER.O88 and CALC.O88. The dock along the bottom holds one tile.
Dock along the bottom. The window stops where the dock starts. It has room for four files.
After
The same CGA screen with Auto-hide on. The APPS window now reaches the bottom edge and lists six files: ARTFUL.O88, AUDIO.O88, BROWSER.O88, CALC.O88, CHART.O88 and FRACTAL.O88. No dock is visible.
Dock hidden. The window runs to the bottom of the screen, 23 rows taller, and lists six files. The dock is the one-pixel line under it.

Both pictures come from the same build of os8088, booted in an emulator with its display set to CGA. The only difference is one tick in the Control Panel. Windows are moved to fit the new space as soon as the setting changes, and a zoomed window like this one fills it the next time it is zoomed.

Hiding it

Out of the way until you reach for it.

With Auto-hide ticked, the dock shrinks to a line one pixel thick along its edge. Windows can use everything up to that line.

Rest the pointer on the line for about a quarter of a second and the dock opens on top of whatever is there. Click a tile as usual. Move the pointer away and the dock closes three quarters of a second later; come back within that time and it stays open.

Programs keep running while the dock is open. A clock keeps ticking and a game keeps drawing -- they draw around the open dock rather than waiting for it to close. When it closes, the part of the screen it covered is put back.

Open
The CGA screen with the zoomed APPS window and the hidden dock opened across the bottom, covering the window's lower edge. The dock holds one tile and the pointer rests at the bottom edge of the screen.
The hidden dock, opened. The pointer is resting on the bottom edge, and the dock has opened over the zoomed window rather than pushing it out of the way.

On the side

A trade of 32 columns for 24 rows, which suits a wide, short screen.

Left
The CGA screen with the dock standing down the left edge holding one tile. The zoomed APPS window fills the rest of the screen to the bottom edge and lists six files.
Dock on the left. The window gets the full height back and gives up a 32-pixel column. It lists the same six files as the hidden dock.

A dock on the left or right edge is 32 pixels wide and always visible. A CGA screen is 640 pixels wide, so that is 5 per cent of the width, where the bottom dock took 12 per cent of the height.

The tiles stack top to bottom instead. A VGA screen has room for all 12. On a CGA there is room for 7, and when more than 7 programs are open, the dock shows the minimized ones first -- an open window can be clicked on the desktop, but a minimized one can only come back from its tile.

Every edge and Auto-hide work on every graphics card, and Auto-hide works on the side edges too.

Try it yourself

Four clicks from the desktop.

  1. Open the Control Panel. It is in the menu under the chip symbol in the top-left corner of the screen.

  2. Pick Dock in the list down the left side of the window. The list scrolls now, because the Control Panel has more pages than fit in it.

  3. Choose an edge, or tick Auto-hide. The desktop changes as soon as you click. Nothing needs a restart.

  4. Close the Control Panel. The setting is saved to the system disk and used on every start after this one.

To see a CGA screen without a CGA card, build os8088 from source with make VIDEO=cga, which skips the check for which card is fitted and assumes a CGA. The source tree also has a ready-made 86Box machine with one: make xt-cga.