GNOME 40 users: do you want to see your favourite apps in the application grid again?
Well, you can! There is (naturally) a GNOME extension that puts shortcuts for apps added to the dock back in the app grid, similar to how things were in GNOME 3.38 and earlier.
Admittedly if you’re yet to try GNOME 40/Ubuntu 21.10 you might be wondering what the heck I’m on about, so I’ll explain.
In GNOME 40 and above, applications that are “pinned” to the Ubuntu Dock (or added as a favourite in the vanilla Dash, which is what GNOME calls the dock) do not appear in the application grid as well:
This approach makes sense; you already have launchers for these apps on the dock so having them appear on screen twice is just redundant. Plus, you can still launch any app by searching for them by name, regardless of where they are (which is arguably the way I use the app grid).
But I’m not everyone and some people don’t mind the repetition; they find having all of their app shortcuts available where they expect them a more logical situation.
And it’s for those folks that the no-frills Favourites in App Grid GNOME extension exists. It puts app shortcuts back in the app grid once enabled (albeit it appends to the very last page of shortcuts so a bit of manual rearranging will be required.
Want a quick way to rearrange apps automatically? Use the alphabetical app grid GNOME extension we wrote about a couple of months ago. With both extensions enabled I get to launch apps from both the dock and the app grid, where they appear in a predicable sequential order.
