Comment 1 for bug 1554128

Hi,

I'm the author of the mate dock applet.

Although there's no right click option, the applet does support starting a new instance of an app. Simply hold down either of the <shift> keys and click the app's dock icon. This works on all of the apps (Terminal, Galculator and Pluma) listed above.

Its actually intended that this option doesn't appear in the menu. There are a couple of reasons for this:

 1) not all apps support running more than one instance. A lot of them do but some (e.g. Gimp, Transmission, Telegram) don't. I don't want to include a menu option which may or may not do anything....

 2) some apps do explicitly allow this (e.g. Chrome, Firefox) in their .desktop file. The applet supports this and will create right click menu options it finds specified in .desktop files.

So the functionality is there but not obvious. At some point in the near future (but probably not till after 16.04 has been released) I'm going to add a 'hints and tips' section to the About dialog. This will include detail about the <shift> click shortcut and also mention that it won't work with all apps.

Hope this is useful...