Sound the ‘long-requested-feature-finally-materalises-in-reality‘ alarm because it looks like GNOME Shell is FINALLY adding drag and drop folder creation to the Applications Overview.
Long time coming, right?
Code contributed by GNOME dev Georges Basile Stavracas Neto (aka Feaneron), and already proposed for merging, is said to “…implement drag n’ drop as a way to way manage folders in GNOME Shell.”
GNOME Shell does support app folders natively, you just can’t create app folders directly from the apps grid by using drag and drop. In fact, the process is really rather hidden, obtusely tucked away in GNOME Software (of all places).
There are third-party extensions which make it easier to create app folders in GNOME Shell, having the functionality native, blessed, and included out-of-the-box is always preferable, isn’t it?
And that’s precisely what Georges’ promising code proposal purports to provide.
Manage GNOME Shell App Folders
Now, bear in mind that what’s talked about in this post is development code that is a) not final and b) rough around the edges. The app folder feature implementation remains a work in progress and is not certain to ship in GNOME 3.34.
But as you can see in the following short video from Alex (aka BabyWogue), the feature already works really well:
Now, I’ve not had a chance to go hands-on with this new fangled feature yet (I don’t run a bleeding edge system) but I’d like to see drag and drop folder management implemented in much the same way as it is on other operating systems (macOS and Chrome OS specifically).
So, for instance, to “undo” putting an app into a folder you drag it back out. If a folder only has a single item in, it stops being a folder and returns to being a regular app tile. To delete a folder you simply remove all items from it.
Finally, to name or rename an app folder you would open it and click the label area quickly edit.