If you read this site regularly you’ll know I’m a big fan of Tiling Shell, a slick, interactive, and highly-configurable window snapping add-on for GNOME Shell.
Well, this week this terrific tiling tool got a new update (which also adds support for GNOME 47, coming in Ubuntu 24.10).
The previous release added yet anotherway to tile windows quickly, so this uplift adds a couple of smaller changes that, I feel, make the nifty Windows Snap Assistant-inspired even more compelling for fans of “real” tiling window manager.
Tiling Shell 13 introduces support for drawing a border inside the focused app window.
This is not enabled by default, and is entirely optional. The width of the border is adjustable from the extension’s Preferences panel, but the border colour isn’t. It seems to be hardcoded as present as it doesn’t follow the system accent colour.
I’m a fan of gaps (configurable in this extension already) but when using keyboard navigation it takes me a second or two to register which window I’ve given focus to, something the window border option helps remedy.
Several new configurable keybindings are available in Tiling Shell 13:
- Keybinding to span multiple tiles
- Keybinding to untile the focused window
- Keybinding to resize the focused window to span all the tiles
And to make managing advanced keybindings easier (and keep the main Preferences window ordered), there’s now a dedicated dialog for keybinding. Tile up/down/left/right remain editable from the main screen, but a dialog groups the rest for easy edit/configure.
And that’s it for this update, but a couple of others have rolled out since I last wrote about it adding, amongst other features, the ability to set a minimum distance for triggering the Snap Assistant drop-zone, and tweaking quarter-tiling activation area.
I do like to iterate each time I cover this add-on that you are not limited to the preset layouts: you can create your own layouts using an on-screen WYSIWG overlay, save them, and switch to/tile to them as and when you need.
I mention this (so much) as I have seen comments questioning the need for this extension as “Ubuntu can already snap to corners”. This does so much more than that, and if you feel limited by simple corners and half tiling, I recommend trying it out.
Tiling Shell is free, open-source software compatible with GNOME Shell 42 and above.