The GNOME Shell extension I look at in this post isn’t going to revolutionise your life but it could make it finding your favourite apps a bit quicker.
It’s called Alphabetical App Grid and —ready those faux shocked faces, folks— it rearranges all of the app shortcuts in the GNOME Shell application launcher in alphabetical order.
Like so:
Hey, I did say it wasn’t going to be revolutionary! 😉
Earlier versions of GNOME Shell did this automatically, but GNOME devs made a few changes to way the app grid works in GNOME 40 so that we can choose, re-order, and re-arrange app shortcuts ourself, create app folders, and not see shortcuts for apps that are pinned to the dock.
On the whole, great changes — but some people prefer the old alphabetised approach.
Plus, while being able to rearrange apps in the picker ourselves (by clicking and dragging them around) it’s easy to end up creating a jumbled-up mess, resulting in needing to squint and scan the grid a few times over to find a specific shortcut!
So if you use Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (or any Linux distro offering GNOME 40 or later) and you want to bring order back to the apps grid without needing to do it manually, give the Alphabetical App Grid GNOME Shell extension a whirl.
It alphabetises the apps grid for you the moment it’s installed. Better still, it can also rearrange shortcuts in app folders you’ve made too (though this setting can be turned off if you’d keep those in an order you prefer).
In all, a helpful extension to bring predictability to the app launcher.
You can install the extension from the GNOME extensions website or install it via the (very ace) GNOME Shell Extensions Manager app, which you can get from the Ubuntu repos.