A new update to Tiling Shell, an efficient window snapping extension for GNOME Shell, is rolling out this weekend with a few appreciable enhancements in tow.
For example, its nifty ‘Windows Suggestions’ feature, which makes it easy to tile your other open windows to remaining spaces in a layout, can now be enabled for use with the Snap Assistant.
If turned on, tiling a window to a layout using the slide-in drop-zone widget will let you select open window it faster to fill the remaining spaces with other open apps, like so:
In this update, Windows Suggestions can be enabled when using Snap Assistant. Suggestions were already available to enable when using hot-key grid tiling and/or when dragging windows to screen edges.
As a reminder to those less-familiar with this extension, Tiling Shell offers lots of different ways to tile windows besides the slide-in Windows 11-esque ‘Snap Assistant’ drop zone you can see demoed in the video above.
It’s possible to tile windows using (custom) keyboard shortcuts; using combination of keyboard and mouse (hold a hotkey while moving a window to reveal a grid); or entirely through the mouse: drag to a screen edge, right-click context menu, or snap assistant.
Beyond suggestions, Tiling Shell v16.3 includes fixes for issues affecting keybindings, like being unable to use them to switch focus from secondary windows, and tiling failing to work under some scaling factors/screen resolutions when inner gaps were set to 0.
Visual tweaks to improve the look of tiles’ border radius and width when gaps are set to 0, which extends to the representations in the layout picker, which is a nice touch:
Finally, this update adds (configurable) keyboard shortcut to hide all application windows apart from the one in focus – no strictly a tiling feature, but something a lot of folks have been asking for, so it’s great to see Tiling Shell’s dev add it in!
In all, another terrific update for this slick, super-popular productivity tool. Anyone looking for a flexible, reliable and highly configurable way to tile windows on Ubuntu (and other GNOME Shell distros) need look no further than this.
Tiling Shell is free, open-source software compatible with GNOME 42 and above.
The easiest way to install it is to search for ‘Tiling Shell’ in the Extensions Manager app and click ‘install’. Once downloaded, it is activated immediately – Ubuntu users should disable the built-in Tiling Assistant extension to avoid conflicts.