Gnome Shell Dash To Panel v14 Brings Intellihide, Configurable Window Previews Size

The Gnome Shell Dash to Panel extension combines the Dash with the top Gnome panel. The result is a single panel that provides an icon taskbar, the tray, system menu, and date / time indicator. This is similar to the KDE Plasma and Windows 7 (and newer) taskbar. The extension supports Gnome Shell 3.18 and newer.

Dash to Panel v14 was released recently with some much needed improvements. This release include an intellihide / auto-hide feature for the panel, which can be customized - you can set it to:

only hide the panel when it's obstructed by windows.
require pressure at the edge of the screen to reveal.
allow the panel to be revealed while in fullscreen mode.

The hide and reveal animation duration, along with the delay before hiding the panel, are configurable as well. You can find the Dash to Panel intellihide feature in the extension settings, at the bottom of the Position and Style tab.

Another important change, at least in my opinion, is the addition of configuration options for the thumbnail preview size and title visibility.

I find the live window previews to be useless for the most part in the default Ubuntu dock, if you enable minimize to click (which is something basic), because it requires a click to be able to see the previews. You might as well click on the window in the taskbar instead of the preview in such cases. But Dash To Panel displays the live previews on mouse hover, which is actually useful, not only to see what's happening in a open window, but also to easily switch to the correct window.

With the new configuration options, the Dash to Dock live window previews feature is even better. One annoyance for me was the size of the live window previews, but this can be changed with the latest Dash to Panel v14. Also, the window title can now be hidden:

Other changes in Dash to Panel v14 include:

you can now change the "Show Applications" button icon (this is the button that opens the Activities)
better Ubuntu 18.04 compatibility
better app icon scaling in HiDPI
better handling of dynamic panel transparency
touch screen improvements
fixes:

long window title rendering in centered mode
key focus when using Remmina

Install Dash To Panel extension

The latest version (v14) of the Dash to Panel extension is not yet available on the Gnome Shell extensions website. For now, this only allows installing Dash to Panel v13:

To install the latest Dash to Panel v14 right now, you can download the extension from GitHub, extract the archive and in the downloaded extension folder, run this command to install it in your home directory:

make install

Once installed, restart Gnome Shell (Alt + F2, then type r and press Enter) so the extension shows up in Gnome Tweaks / installed extensions, and enable it from there.