Unity Stacks Application `Drawers` Updated With New Active Drawers Feature, Other Changes

Drawers is an application that creates "stacks" (drawers) on the Unity Launcher, which can be used to organize various files, folders, applications or links for quick access, create drawers that automatically display the applications in a category and more.

A new "Active Folder" drawer

The application has been updated today, getting quite a few new features, including a new type of drawers called "Active Drawers". This type of drawer lets you view and launch the contents of a folder that's constantly monitored for changes, so when you add new files to that folder, they show up in the drawer. You can also access the files in that folder via quicklists (right click) available for the Active Drawer Unity Launcher icon:

Active Folder quicklists

The Active Drawer can display 10 most recent items as quicklists but you can pin items to the quicklists so they are always displayed.

Note: adding new files to the Active Drawer copies the files to the disk (so they aren't just simple shortcuts) and also, removing the files from the Active Drawer moves them to Trash.

Other changes in the latest Drawers 13.2.1:

• Drawers can now save their state (location, sort and pin state);
• added a checkbox to Autostart on Login in Preferences (this will open the drawer on startup);
• added Pin Window BELOW others;
• buttons in drawer are hidden when mouse is not over drawer;
• added "More Help" button on Help window presented in right-click popup menu;
• fixed theme issues when Gtk themes other than Ambiance were used;
• fixed Drawer Preferences bugs related to icons not found;

With this release, there's also initial support for using the drawers as desktop widgets. However, for now the Unity Launcher icon continues to be displayed when trying to achieve this, but this should be fixed in a future version.

A regular drawer I've created for quickly launching Steam games

It's also worth mentioning that since our last Drawers article, the application has improved a lot and now the drawers are automatically added to the Unity Launcher, there are new default icons and more.

Install Drawers in Ubuntu

To install Drawers in Ubuntu 13.04, 12.10 or 12.04, use the following commands in a terminl:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ian-berke/ppa-drawers
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install drawers

If you encounter bugs, report them @ Launchpad.