Dock Pill
The dock pill is a compact floating window — 148 × 60 px, pill-shaped with rounded corners, a coral glow border, and a dark surface. It replaces the full MainWindow when you want capture always available but with near-zero screen footprint.
What It Looks Like
Two buttons:
| Button | Action |
|---|---|
| Region | Runs CaptureRegionCommand — same overlay as the main toolbar. |
| Undock | Expands back to the full MainWindow. |
There is also an icon drag handle on the left — click and drag anywhere on the icon to move the pill around the screen. Default position is bottom-centre of the primary monitor.
Docking and Undocking
Docking is controlled by MainWindowViewModel.IsDocked:
| State | MainWindow | DockPillWindow |
|---|---|---|
IsDocked = false | Shown. | Hidden. |
IsDocked = true | Hidden. | Shown. |
- From MainWindow, click the Dock icon in the toolbar. The window hides and the pill appears.
- From the pill, click the Undock button. The pill hides and MainWindow returns.
Toggling does not destroy state — annotations, history, and settings persist across dock transitions.
Launching Straight into Dock Mode
| Setting | Default | Effect |
|---|---|---|
UI.DockToBottom | false | When true, Tex boots directly to the dock pill instead of showing the full window. |
Set this via Settings → UI → Dock to Bottom for a minimal always-on capture UI from launch.
Tip — DockToBottom (the setting) and IsDocked (runtime state) are separate. Toggling dock during a session does not rewrite the setting, and changing the setting does not affect the current session until next launch.
Positioning
The pill is fully draggable and remembers its position across sessions. On first run it positions itself at bottom-centre of the primary monitor, DPI-aware — physical-pixel screen bounds are converted to DIPs so the pill lands correctly on 4K and high-DPI displays.
Warning — on multi-monitor setups, the pill is placed on the primary monitor. If you unplug that monitor, drag the pill back into a visible area via the icon handle, or undock and re-dock to reset.
Combined with Tray
When IsDocked == true and UI.StartMinimized == true, even the pill is hidden on launch — Tex runs tray-only with the global hotkey (Ctrl+Shift+S by default) as your only capture surface. See 09.2.
Related
- Toolbar reference and MainWindow: see 01 - Core Concepts.
- Global hotkeys: see 10 - Settings and Preferences.