hzhang
57df2bcfbd
Mark a workspace as a grid; windows auto-fill cells, Alt+drag dividers to resize rows/columns, drag-to-swap, overflow pops to a normal workspace. Normal workspaces untouched. Tiling Assistant coexistence. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2.2 KiB
GridSpaces
A GNOME Shell extension that turns a chosen workspace into a flexible tiling grid. Normal workspaces are left completely untouched.
Status: experimental / alpha. GNOME Shell 48, Wayland & X11. Developed and tested inside a throwaway VM — a buggy shell extension can crash your session on Wayland. Try it the same way (see Safety below).
What it does
- Mark any workspace as a grid workspace from the panel button (⊞).
- A grid workspace is a stack of rows; each row has its own column count. Every cell holds at most one window, which is resized to fill the cell.
- Any window entering a grid workspace auto-fills the first free cell. When the grid is full, the window bounces back to where it came from.
- Drag a window onto another cell to swap the two windows.
- Alt+drag the divider lines to resize adjacent rows / columns. Sizes are percentages of the work area and always sum to 100; a preview line follows the pointer and the change is applied on release.
- Removing a row / shrinking the grid pops the overflow windows to the nearest normal workspace.
- Coexists with Ubuntu's Tiling Assistant: its drop popup is suppressed only while a grid workspace is active, and restored otherwise.
Install
git clone https://git.hangman-lab.top/hzhang/GridSpaces.git \
~/.local/share/gnome-shell/extensions/gridspaces@hzhang.local
Then log out and back in (Wayland cannot hot-load a new extension), and:
gnome-extensions enable gridspaces@hzhang.local
Usage
- Switch to the workspace you want to tile.
- Click the ⊞ panel button → toggle Grid workspace on.
- Use Add row and the per-row column steppers to shape the layout.
- Alt+drag the divider lines to adjust row heights / column widths.
- Open or drag windows in; drag a window onto another cell to swap.
Safety
This is an in-development GNOME Shell extension. On a Wayland session an unhandled error in a shell extension can crash the whole session. Do not add it to your autostart while iterating. Test in a VM with a clean snapshot, or at minimum enable it manually (never via the autostart list) so a crash recovers to a clean desktop instead of a login loop.
License
MIT