You have Claude open beside your work. You maximize the other window, and Claude is gone. Always On Dock reserves a strip of the desktop for it through Windows itself — so nothing can cover it, and it never covers anything.
There are two usual ways to keep a window visible on Windows. Each fixes half the problem and creates the other half.
Snap puts Claude and your work side by side, and it holds — right up until you maximize something. The moment you start actually working, the maximized window expands over the whole screen and Claude is hidden behind it again.
Pinning Claude above everything keeps it visible, but now it floats over your work and hides whatever is underneath — usually the exact code, document or sheet you're discussing. You spend the session nudging it aside and back.
Always On Dock solves both. It reserves the space rather than arranging windows in it, so the split can't collapse — and because the space is genuinely reserved, nothing has to float above anything. Claude stays put, and your work keeps every pixel that isn't the strip.
Windows can mark part of the screen as unavailable. It's how the taskbar works — maximize any window and it stops neatly above the taskbar rather than covering it. That mechanism, the AppBar system, isn't reserved for Microsoft's own components. Always On Dock uses it to claim a strip for whatever you drop in. Dock Claude there and maximize your editor: the editor fills the rest of the screen and stops at the edge.
| Always on top | Reserved space | |
|---|---|---|
| Visible over a maximized window | Yes | Yes |
| Hides part of your work | Yes | No |
| Survives you maximizing something | Yes | Yes |
| Needs repositioning | Often | Never — fixed strip |
| Claude plus a terminal at once | Two floating windows, overlapping each other | Both in the strip, split vertically |
| Jump focus back with a shortcut | No | Ctrl+Alt+F |
Paste the error, read the explanation, fix the code — without a window switch in the loop.
Keep the conversation open while you work through a draft section by section.
The reasoning stays visible beside the spreadsheet or dataset it refers to.
Ask as you read, with both the answer and the file in view at the same time.
Draft in your editor, discuss in the dock, neither one covering the other.
Dock Claude and a terminal together in the same strip, split vertically.
Reserve desktop space for it. Always On Dock claims a strip through Windows itself, so a maximized editor stops at the edge of that strip instead of expanding over the Claude window.
No. An always-on-top window floats above your work and hides whatever is underneath it. Reserved space sits beside your work instead — nothing overlaps in either direction.
Yes — up to three windows share the strip on each monitor, split vertically and reorderable by dragging.
Yes. Any ordinary Windows window can be docked, desktop app or browser.
Enable a dock on any combination of screens. Each remembers its own width and restores at sign-in.
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