If you’re an avid user of GNOME Shell extensions then a) you’re in good company, and b) you’ll be familiar with Matt Jakeman’s terrific Extension Manager app since it makes finding, installing and managing GNOME extensions terrifically easy.
This week Extension Manager received a small-ish update.
I was going to cover the changes in my next Linux Release Roundup at the end of the month, but with GNOME 48 out—cue the “does my favourite extension still work” panic—it feels fitting to let the update stand in a solo spotlight.
Especially since Extension Manager‘s Flatpak build now depends on the GNOME 48 runtime. If you’re installing it for the first time or upgrading an earlier version from Flathub, be aware this new runtime will be pulled in as part of it.
The bulk of changes in Extension Manager 0.6.2 are visual tweaks and adaptability buffs to improved the user experience, including several UI changes to take advantage of the latest widgets provided by GNOME 48’s GTK4/libadwaita updates.
When reading reviews of GNOME Shell extensions on a listing page in the new version you’ll see that review pods now adaptively size based on the length of text of each comment. Previously, the pod was uniformly sized based on the length of the longest review.
If you ever noticed that some extensions descriptions in the manage tab (shown when expanding an extension row) spilled over the margin on narrow widths, that’s solved.
Similarly, when viewing a list of extensions in browse/search views the ‘install’ button text gets replaced by a space-efficient download icon instead.
The ‘Compatibility Checker’ feature (which lets you find out how many currently installed add-ons are available for/work with a different version of GNOME) improves its initial dialog, and swaps text labels in the compatibility results sheet for icons.
Other visual tweaks are present too, including a reworked error dialog should the app crash and an indicator to denote when an extension—few do—use session modes (i.e., that work on the lockscreen).
Beyond that, a bunch of bug fixes, crash corrections, translation updates, and assorted errata finesse.
In all, a welcome set of UI improvements for an indispensable app.
Get Extension Manager
Extension Manager is free, open source software. You’ll find source code, along with more information, links to report issues/bugs, on the project GitHub.
Ubuntu user? You can install an older version (not including the changes listed above) from the repos. Alternatively, install the latest version from Flathub.