Wharf

When AfterStep forked from fvwm in 1996 it needed a counterpart to NeXTSTEP's dock. The model already existed in fvwm's GoodStuff module, a button bar by Robert Nation, and Wharf is that redrawn into NeXT's 64×64 tiles with bevelled edges. Each button has an icon and a command, but what made it popular was Swallow: a button could capture another X window and display it inside the tile, so asclock, a load meter or a mailbox lived inside the dock. Folders slid out a row of sub-buttons on click, and everything was defined in a text file called wharf in AfterStep's configuration directory.

The 64×64 tile with a swallowed program became the standard for a whole genre of dockapps, which Window Maker's Dock and Clip adopted almost unchanged; most late-1990s dockapps run in either. GoodStuff itself grew into FvwmButtons, and fvwm 2 carried its own port called FvwmWharf for a while. Wharf is still in AfterStep 2 and looks very much as it did in 1997, which for its users is the whole point.