Continuing my journey of tailoring GNOME to better suit my needs, I present another extension that has made my experience just that little bit more seamless.

Perhaps one of the most jarring aspects of the GNOME shell is its reluctance to bring existing windows to the foreground when launched from other processes. For example, when opening a web link, GNOME presents a notification telling you Web is ‘ready’ rather than bringing an existing Web window to the foregound; focusing Web requires you to click the notification. While I trust there are good intentions behind this decision, it leaves everything feeling clunky. Thankfully, ‘Steal my focus window’ exists to bypass these interstitial notifications—a must for any GNOME setup.

Living in the terminal as much as I do, one thing that’s frustrated me with GNOME Console is it’s insistance on remembering the last window size. While this behavior might be desirable for most apps, I find I treat terminals differently—I expect them to start at a standard size that’s good enough for most actions and only expand them if the task requires it.

Thankfully, it turns out Console does support disabling window size restoration through a hidden setting:

gsettings set org.gnome.Console restore-window-size false

With this, windows will open at 80x24 by default, making everything just a little calmer and more predictable.

As a reluctant Apple user, I’ve been testing the waters of Linux and specificlly GNOME for the past few years. While I miss the familiarity and maturity of macOS, I like the minimalism of GNOME and I’ve been incredibly impressed with how it translates to smaller screens like the MNT Pocket Reform. I even find I’m OK with the controversial decision to remove the desktop. Still, there remain a few rough edges, and places where I miss functionality from macOS. For those, I’m relying on a couple of GNOME extensions:

• Alphabetical App Grid

  I’m one of those rare people who relies on macOS LaunchPad and carefully groups apps into folders. Unfortunately, it’s fiddly and tedious to manage the app grid—GNOME’s equivalent—so instead I allow ‘Alphabetical App Grid’ to simply keep it sorted for me.

• gTile

  I’ve used Divvy for years on macOS to allow me to quickly position windows using hotkeys. After all that time, I have a few key combinations I just can’t do without and, while I can snap windows left, right, and fullscreen just fine out-of-the-box with GNOME (something Apple’s only just added native support for this year), I love being able to center a portrait window on screen. The UI is a little more fiddly than I might like, but ‘gTile’ lets me do exactly that.

I’ve also been enjoying using the built-in ‘Apps Menu’ and ‘Places Status Indicator’ which add menus to the status bar for opening apps and special folders respectively. I miss the Mac OS 9 days of having programs in the Apple menu and this is a nice and useful throwback.