Aero Dock

A modern free and open-source RocketDock and Nexus Dock alternative for Windows 10 and 11.

Live window previews, Aero glass, cursor magnification, and full desktop customization.

Built in the Frutiger Aero design language: pin your apps to a floating pane of glass, watch icons grow under the cursor, and let light drift across the whole thing.

Aero Dock is an app launcher and window switcher for Windows, in the same vein as RocketDock and Winstep Nexus Dock. It sits on any screen edge and covers what the taskbar covers, in glass.

The Windows side is Rust calling Win32 and COM directly. Shortcut resolution, icon extraction, window tracking and the live previews all go through real Windows APIs. The interface on top is React in WebView2, which is how the blur and gloss work at all.

If you used RocketDock years ago and miss it, this is aimed squarely at you. Its last release was 2008.

Dock

• Any edge: bottom, top, left or right, floating or flush
• Per monitor DPI aware, with a monitor picker on multi display setups
• Cursor magnification on springs, idle float, launch bounce, glass tooltips
• Auto hide with an 8px reveal strip, a configurable delay, and it stays put while you drag files onto it

Modes

• A mode keeps its own pinned apps, window layout and per-app volumes
• Give each one an icon from the preset grid, or any character you like
• Switch from the tile on the dock and all three come back at once
• Save the open windows into a mode, restore them later; windows that are still open get moved, apps that were closed get opened
• Optional automatic switching: name the apps that belong to a mode and bringing one to the front loads it

Audio

• Scroll an app icon to set that app's volume, middle-click to mute
• Right-click to choose which output an app uses
• The same knob the Windows volume mixer shows, so the two agree

Desktop widgets

• Glass widgets on the wallpaper: clock, calendar, weather, system stats and a music player
• Drag to move, drag a corner to resize; the rest of the desktop keeps working normally
• Each one picks its own material, tint, opacity and ambient effects
• Off until you turn them on

Apps and windows

• Running indicators. Click to focus, click again to cycle or minimize
• Live window previews using real DWM thumbnails, framed in glass
• Drag to reorder, or drop apps, files and folders in from Explorer
• Folder flyouts, and stacks that group several pins behind one tile
• Context menu: open, run as administrator, open file location, pin, unpin

Search

• Keyboard overlay across installed apps, including Microsoft Store apps, plus recent files

System corner

• Clock, battery, network, volume (scroll to change, click to mute), Recycle Bin
• Every built-in item can be turned off, including the search and settings buttons

Appearance

• Six themes: Aero, Ocean, Forest, Aurora, Sunset, Night
• Two glass materials: Classic, the glossy Aero panel, and Liquid, thin glass that refracts what is behind it. Set per window, so the dock and settings can differ. The dock is a transparent window, so it gets the rim and the transparency but cannot bend the desktop behind it
• Optional wallpaper colour sync
• Ambient scenes behind the dock: dust, rain, snow, bubbles, aurora
• Sliders for glass, bloom, reflections, particles, opacity, speed
• Honours prefers-reduced-motion

Live window previews. Real DWM thumbnails, so you see what each window is doing.

Settings, in the same glass as the dock.

Grab the installer from the latest release and run it. It installs per user, so no admin rights.

Aero Dock lives in your system tray. Left click the tray icon to show or hide the dock, right click for settings and quit.

The installer is not code signed, because certificates cost money this project does not have. Windows will show a "Windows protected your PC" box the first time. Click More info, then Run anyway. If you would rather not trust a binary, build it yourself.

There is a portable zip on the same release page. Unpack it anywhere and run Aero Dock.exe. No installer, no admin, nothing written outside the folder.

Settings, pinned apps and the icon cache go in a data folder next to the exe, so the whole thing fits on a USB stick. What makes it portable is the portable.txt file shipped in the zip. Delete that file and the same executable goes back to using %APPDATA% like an installed copy.

Settings, then About, tells you which mode you are in and where the files are.

One caveat: Start Aero Dock when I sign in writes a registry entry pointing at wherever the exe sits at that moment. Turn it off before moving the folder.

• Windows 10 version 1809 or later, or Windows 11
• x64
• WebView2 runtime, already present on Windows 11 and current Windows 10

First launch offers to import a starter set of your apps, or to start empty.

Aero Dock makes no network requests. No telemetry, no analytics, no crash reporting, no update check, no account.

The one exception is the weather widget, and it takes two deliberate steps to get there: adding the widget, and allowing it in Settings, then Widgets. It then asks Open-Meteo for conditions at the coordinates you typed in and sends nothing else, with no account and no key. Leave it alone and nothing in the app ever reaches the network.

The one outbound action is opening a URL in your browser, and only when you click something that obviously does that, like the GitHub button in Settings.

Your config is a single file:

%APPDATA%\com.aerodock.desktop\settings.json

Extracted icons are cached as PNGs next to it. Delete that folder to reset. Modes, including their saved window layouts, live in the same file. A portable copy puts both in data\ beside the exe instead.

You need Rust (stable, MSVC), Visual Studio Build Tools with the "Desktop development with C++" workload, Node.js 22+, and pnpm 10+.

git clone https://github.com/TheAgencyMGE/aero-dock.git
cd aero-dock
pnpm install
pnpm tauri:dev      # run with hot reload
pnpm tauri:build    # NSIS installer in src-tauri/target/release/bundle/nsis
pnpm tauri:portable # portable zip, after tauri:build
pnpm check          # typecheck, clippy, Rust tests, production build

Nothing appeared after install. Check the system tray. Left click the icon.

Some icons are letters. Windows could not extract an icon for that target, so the dock falls back to the app's initial. Usually the shortcut points at something that no longer exists.

Previews are blank. Some apps render with their own compositor and produce no DWM thumbnail.

Store app windows group oddly. Packaged apps all run under ApplicationFrameHost.exe, so Aero Dock identifies them by AppUserModelID. That covers most cases and misses a few.

Wrong monitor. Settings, then Dock, then Monitor. The picker shows up with two or more displays.

Settings will not open. Quit from the tray and start it again. If it keeps happening, open an issue with your Windows build.

• Windows only. The platform layer is isolated so a port is realistic, but no macOS or Linux backend exists.
• UWP window grouping does not resolve for every app.
• Windows has no public API for sending one app to a chosen audio output. Aero Dock records the choice and opens the Windows page that performs the routing, so the last step is a click there.
• Restoring a workspace gives a relaunched app about a second and a half to show a window. Anything slower keeps its own default geometry.
• The installer is unsigned, so expect SmartScreen on first run.
• Memory sits around 180MB while you use it and about 140MB once it has been left alone for a minute. That is still heavy for a dock, and nearly all of it is the WebView2 rendering stack rather than the dock itself.

Aero Dock is free and independently developed. If you enjoy using it, you can support continued development on Ko-fi.

It stays free either way, with no paid tier and nothing held back.

Pull requests welcome. CONTRIBUTING.md has the setup and the house rules. docs/ARCHITECTURE.md maps the codebase and is worth reading before anything non trivial.

A macOS or Linux backend is a well shaped place to start. The platform layer is already isolated behind src-tauri/src/platform/.

Tauri 2, Rust with windows-rs, React 19, TypeScript, Vite, motion, PixiJS, zustand

MIT © Ryan Panda