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The zooming dock for KDE Plasma 6

Krema is the spiritual successor to Latte Dock, built for KDE Plasma 6 and native to Wayland. It pairs parabolic zoom with live PipeWire window previews.

Install Watch the clips

Same desktop, two bottom edges

Drag the handle across one Plasma 6 desktop. On the left is the panel a fresh Plasma 6.7 install starts with, redrawn from a capture. On the right is Krema with the same apps. Point at an icon on the Krema side and it grows.

Krema is the spiritual successor to Latte Dock, written from scratch for Plasma 6 with Qt 6, KDE Frameworks 6 and the Wayland layer shell. Both sides use Breeze Dark and KDE’s Breeze icons (LGPL-3.0). Firefox and its logo are trademarks of the Mozilla Foundation.

The dock in motion

Parabolic zoom Icons swell under the pointer and push their neighbours aside.
Window previews Hover a running app for a live window thumbnail.
Window groups Several windows, one icon: click a thumbnail to raise it.
Badges and attention Badges show counts, and icons move when an app needs you.
Progress on icons A count badge and a filling progress bar sit on the icon.
Scroll to switch Scroll over an icon to cycle through that app’s windows.
Drag to reorder Drag an icon to a new place in the dock.
Dodge windows A covering window pushes the dock away until it leaves.
Auto-hide The dock stays hidden until the pointer reaches the edge.
Keyboard control Meta+F5 focuses the dock, and arrow keys move between icons.
Background styles Switch between tinted, acrylic, transparent and panel-matched backgrounds live.
Live settings Change a setting and the dock updates right away.
Launch feedback Icons bounce on launch, and a dot marks running apps.
On the desktop Ten pinned launchers under Dolphin and Konsole, with a dot under each open app.
Dolphin and Konsole open on the dark Roast Contours wallpaper, with Krema docked along the bottom edge showing ten pinned launchers and running indicators beneath Dolphin, Konsole and the minimised Kate.
Settings window The Appearance page: icon size, spacing, zoom, attention animation and badges.
The Krema settings window on the Appearance page, with options for icon size, spacing, zoom factor, attention animation and badge display.

Try the settings

This is a demo drawn by the page, not the app. Settings keep the names they have in Krema, where they sit on three pages: Appearance, Behavior and Window Preview. Here they are grouped by topic, with a few buttons that act out what the dock does.

Appearance

1.6×

Icons grow under the pointer and settle as it leaves. At 1.0× they stay still.

48 px

How big icons are before they zoom.

Krema detects padding built into icon themes and rescales, so icons line up.

Background style

The surface behind the icons.

Behavior

Pinned apps stay in place and a dot marks each open one. Scroll over an app to step through its windows.

Visibility mode

Auto hide waits for the pointer at the screen edge. Dodge windows moves only when a window is in the way.

A window over the dock

Slide a window down onto the dock to see what Auto hide and Dodge windows do.

Window Preview

See the window before you switch to it. All of an app’s windows sit side by side in one popup.

Hover an app to see its windows as live thumbnails, captured through PipeWire on the GPU.

Click to switch

Click a thumbnail to raise that window.

Close from the preview

Close a window from its thumbnail.

Attention

A calm dock that still tells you when something needs you. Long jobs, like a Dolphin file copy, draw a progress bar on the icon.

Badge display

Unread counts from the SmartLauncher (Unity) D-Bus API.

6 styles for an app that needs you: bounce, wiggle, pulse, glow, dot color or blink.

5 s

Seconds before the animation stops. 0 means no limit.

A Plasma setting, not a Krema one. While it is on, attention animations stay quiet and badges still show.

Ask for attention

Have Discover send a notification and see the animation you picked.

Screens

One dock, many screens, each set up its own way.

Monitor mode

Pick one screen, all of them, or let the dock follow the active screen.

Follow trigger

What decides the active screen when the dock follows it.

Virtual desktops

Which windows show when you use more than one desktop.

Plasma and accessibility

Built with Kirigami, KConfig, KColorScheme and KGlobalAccel. It starts with your session.

Plasma color scheme

A Plasma setting, not a Krema one. Krema follows your color scheme and uses Breeze context menus and a Kirigami settings window.

Drag and drop

Reorder icons, drop files onto apps, or drag in a .desktop file to add a launcher.

Drag icons in the preview, or use the arrow keys here.

Keyboard first

Every item works without a mouse. AT-SPI exposes the dock to screen readers.

Shortcuts

KGlobalAccel holds them, so they work from any window.

Global shortcuts
ShortcutAction
Meta + `Show or hide the dock
Meta + 1 to 9Activate the app in that slot
Meta + Shift + 1 to 9Open a new instance of it
Meta + F5Move keyboard focus into the dock

Press a shortcut here to try it in the preview.

Install in two steps

  1. Add the package

    yay -S krema

    Arch Linux and Manjaro, from the AUR. paru -S krema works too.

    sudo dnf copr enable isac322/krema
sudo dnf install krema

    Fedora 42, 43, 44 and Rawhide, from COPR.

    sudo add-apt-repository ppa:isac322/krema
sudo apt update
sudo apt install krema

    Ubuntu 25.10 and 26.04, from the Launchpad PPA. On 25.04, use the OBS repository.

    sudo zypper addrepo https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:isac322/openSUSE_Tumbleweed/home:isac322.repo
sudo zypper refresh
sudo zypper install krema

    This is for Tumbleweed. On Slowroll or Leap 16.0, swap openSUSE_Tumbleweed for openSUSE_Slowroll or openSUSE_Leap_16.0.

    echo 'deb http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/isac322/Debian_13/ /' | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/krema.list
curl -fsSL https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:isac322/Debian_13/Release.key | gpg --dearmor | sudo tee /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/home_isac322.gpg > /dev/null
sudo apt update
sudo apt install krema

    Debian 13 (Trixie), from the Open Build Service.

    git clone https://github.com/isac322/krema
cd krema
just configure
just build
just run

    Needs C++23, Qt 6.8 or newer, KDE Frameworks 6 and CMake 3.22 or newer. The README lists every dependency.

  2. Open Krema

    Start Krema from the app launcher. From then on it starts with your session.

    To change how it looks, right-click the dock and choose Settings.

    Packages need Plasma 6.0 or newer and are built for x86_64 and aarch64 (Slowroll: x86_64 only).

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