If you’ve tried the Tiling Shell GNOME extension you’ll know how easy it makes it to tile application windows in GNOME Shell, from simple to more complex.

The latest update, which began rolling out through the GNOME Extensions website this weekend, adds yet another intuitive way to tile windows as you work.

First it provided a slide-in Windows 11-style Snap Assistant on to which you drop windows to tile them accordingly. Next, it added keyboard shortcuts to support tiling windows without using a mouse. More recently, edge-tiling was introduced.

And you can activate an on-screen drop-zone by moving a window and holding a hot key (defaults to ctrl but you can change it, or set no hot key at all).

Now, the new Tiling Shell v12 adds another way to tile – one that doesn’t require keyboard finger gymnastics or moving applications windows around the screen to activate triggers…

Tiling Shell v12: Titlebar Tiling

Tile app windows by right-clicking on the title bar

With Tiling Shell v12, right-click on an application window1 to access tiling options from the context menu.

The top section shows three tiling options, all based on the active layout (you can change active layout using the Tiling Shell panel applet or the slide-in Snap Assistant that appears when you move a window).

  • “Move to best tile” – tile window to empty zone nearest to the centre of the screen
  • “Move to rightmost tile” – tile window to nearest empty zone on right
  • “Move to leftmost tile” – tile window to nearest empty zone on left

If only one zone is free in your active layout then a single “move to best tile” option is shown instead: –

Only one section free? That’ll be the best tile, innit

But perhaps you don’t want to tile to the active layout.

At the bottom of the context menu is an overview of all preset and saved layouts. To tile an application to a segment in one of these, click a zone in any layout and your window will seamlessly morph to fit2 it.

Remember: Tiling Shell lets you create and save multiple layouts. You are not limited to four basic corners or two side-by-side.

The options the menu shows are from your chosen layouts

Wondering why these options aren’t bound to a window control button, as similar tiling features on Windows 11, macOS, and Chrome OS are? GNOME limitations — but this feels a competent compromise and is just as easy to access.

Beyond that exciting addition a flurry of smaller fixes come bundled in this update.

The colour detection for the (optional) blur effect introduced in the previous update now works properly under light themes, and keyboard shortcuts for moving or tiling windows now takes into account multiple monitors, making it possible to tile windows to/from monitors.

Install Tiling Shell GNOME Extension

Tiling Shell is free, open-source software that works with GNOME Shell 42 and above. Get it from the GNOME Extensions website if you don’t already have it, or log-out and back-in to apply the background update if you do.

As ever, installing GNOME Shell extensions on Ubuntu is easiest using the Extensions Manager app, which is available to install directly from the Ubuntu 24.04 LTS repo.

Extensions Manager lets you search, browse, preview, install, and manage extensions, access their settings, and lets you know when there’s update available.

  1. This context menu shows for all apps that draw GTK titlebars. Apps that draw their own window decorations, like Google Chrome, Firefox (no titlebar), some Electron tools, etc, won’t show this menu. To access it, focus the app and press alt + space instead. ↩︎
  2. Assuming it can resize to the selected size. Some applications have a hardcoded minimum width/height – this extension can’t bypass ’em. ↩︎