A new version of the Tiling Shell GNOME extension is out, adding support for GNOME 51 and a faster way to tile app windows using nothing but your mouse.
Tiling Shell v18.0 lets you use your right mouse button for tiling system activation. It’s feature fans of Tiling Shell had requested, many accustomed to it from Windows’ PowerToys’ FancyZones.
You click your left button to grab and drag the window then, with it held, hold the right mouse button to trigger the on-screen tiling layout. Release the left button over a zone and the window snaps to it – no keys needed.
It sounds more laborious than it feels in use, here’s a quick video demo:
The “right mouse button” tiling option is not enabled by default, so if you want to try this out, you’ll need to open the extension’s settings dialog and enable it.
It adds to Tiling Shell’s compliment of ways to manage windows. That include drag-and-drop zones, keyboard shortcuts and the ability to right-click GTK windows and choose a position from the context menu – pick and choose the ones that work for you.
Tiling Shell v18’s other changes
This update also resolves issue with scaling. If you found the snap assistant, menu, layout editor and other UI elements looked excessively large on your desktop when fractional scaling was enabled, things should look normal again now.
You can now set a shortcut to un-tile all windows from a tiling layout at once, which is nifty, and decide if changing the active layout on one workspace, changes it for all workspaces.
And there’s an additional (still optional) “raise together” behaviour to limit this behaviour to the current display, so tiled windows on other monitors aren’t raised with it.
Installing the extension
If you want to try it out, this update is available on the GNOME Extensions website, where it works with GNOME 45 through 51 (Ubuntu 24.04 LTS or later and you’re good).
While Ubuntu 26.10 has its own layout picker to drop windows on to, Tiling Shell lets you create, edit and switch between your own custom layouts.
Existing users get this update automatically, though it will only apply after logging out and back in – if you’ve not done so for a few days, a reminder to.
When using Tiling Shell on Ubuntu, turn off the built-in Tiling Assistant extension. This will avoid conflicts between two competing approaches. Go to Settings > Ubuntu Desktop > Enhanced Tiling and slide the toggle off.