Dock visual improvements

[LordFonDragon]

Problem

OS 8.1 Circe did a lot of great things to the dock visually like blur and better animations on the workspace indicators. But there are a few areas where it underdelivers:

Icon interactions are still static compared to the workspace elements.
The active new workspace still shows a "+" for no reason at all.
The dock's corner radius is weirdly rounder than windows, but not enough to separate it visually.
The tab switcher uses the double border contrast which didn't really carry over to the dock making it all look inconsistent.

Proposal

1. Accent colour on the active workspace indicator, same as how active/selected states behave in the shell.

2. Remove the "+" from the new workspace when it's currently active. It's a dynamic workspace, when you're in it, there's nothing to add.

Kooha-2026-05-21-17-28-42.webm

Empty active indicator is more logical here.

3. Microinteractions on app icons. The workspace elements have proper animations now, the app icons don't.

Kooha-2026-05-21-17-23-22.webm

Why not add them?

4. Double border like the tab switcher.

5. Slightly rounder corner radius on the dock. It's already 1px rounder than windows. I think there's clearly some tendency to separate it visually. Sharp corners make sense on windows from a utilisation standpoint. The dock on other hand is more of a floating separate element.

Prior Art (Optional)

No response

[dakshshrivastav]

notification badge too big in dock

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in dock

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in app launcher

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what's the need of the background app indicator? why not just keep the dot below the app icon in dock?

[LordFonDragon]

Yeah, forgot that one too. Also the dock padding is off because of the bottom indicator. Fixed in my version.

[danirabbit]

Converting this to a discussion post since you’ve got a number of things in here. Issues should be singular work items. So there would be one issue for badges, one for highlighting, one for border radius etc