Back in April we showed you a couple of different ways to add folders to GNOME Shell’s Application Overview to, y’know, help keep your app launchers nice and tidy.

Now we’re back with another — and it’s far simpler to use than either of our earlier solutions.

Say hello to App Folders Management Extension, a (pretty slick) GNOME extension that lets you easily and quickly manager GNOME app folders directly from the Applications Overview screen itself.

Once installed it lets you create, edit, and organise app folders in the GNOME Applications Overview from the overview.

You just right-click on an application launcher and select (or create) a folder to add it to:

Applications can appear in multiple folders. So you may want, say, the Corebird Twitter client to appear in both an ‘internet’ folder and ‘Social Networking’ folder. This extension allows you to do that.

To remove an app from a folder you use the same right-click menu, but this time select the ‘remove from’ option:

You can also delete entire app folders — though relax: this doesn’t delete the applications inside ’em!

The version of the App Folders Management extension we tested (and visible in these screenshots) is the trunk version from Github. You can use it too: just download the .zip, install it through GNOME Tweak Tool > Extensions, then enable it, and then restart your GNOME session.

Why the development version? Well, honestly, it gives a far more polished and stable experience than the version available to install from the GNOME Extensions website.

Better yet, the dev version has a really neat (albeit somewhat hidden) feature that lets you change the number of columns in the application overview.

The minimum number is 4:

The maximum number is 10. However my screen width (1440px) seems to display a hard limit of 7:

While the UX of App Folders Management isn’t quite as seamless as drag and drop reordering would be — which really would be super sweet, wouldn’t it? — but when compared to the alternative solutions it’s pretty much the next best thing.

App Folder Manager is definitely going down in my must-have GNOME extensions list.