Thursday, June 21, 2012

Gnome Shell grid workspaces

By default, Gnome Shell tries to maintain only one workspace including the ones that are in use. This can be a great pain when being used to have some sort of structure on your desktop.

There is however a combination of extensions for Gnome Shell that allows you to configure your good 'ol 3x3 or 6x2 set of workspaces! Here are the links:


When both are installed, rigt click anywhere on the workspace indicator on the bottom right side of the screen and select how many workspaces (vertical and horizontal) you want.

Update:

You may also want to hide the bottom panel. By default this is not an option.
However, there are basically two fixes available.

1. With CSS (the most clean way)

Open, and edit ~/.local/share/gnome-shell/extensions/Bottom_Panel@rmy.pobox.com/stylesheet.css on line 6, change the height to 0px.

All credit goes to Brian McSweeney

2. With JavaScript (the alternative way)

For instructions, have a look at this comment at Ask Ubuntu.

All credit goes to Rasmus.

PS

In both cases, remember to update GNOME Shell (Alt + F2) and execute 'r' (for refresh).

Happy tweaking!

2 comments:

  1. There's a better way of hiding the bottom panel than what Rasmus suggested on AskUbuntu.

    In ~/.local/share/gnome-shell/extensions/Bottom_Panel@rmy.pobox.com/stylesheet.css, change line 6 to height: 0;

    With Rasmus' suggestion, I ended up getting incredibly awkward-looking notifications since the space at the bottom of the screen was still reserved for the panel (Although this didn't affect fullscreen windows). Setting the height of the panel to 0 eliminates this.

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    Replies
    1. Thanks for your solution! I will incorporate it into this post shortly.

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