The GNOME Shell extension Ubuntu pre-installs to provide desktop icons functionality has added a slate of new keyboard shortcuts in its latest release.
DING (Desktop Icons New Generation) is what enables you to place app shortcuts, files, folders, access drive mount icons and transient content directly on the Ubuntu desktop itself.
The extension supports drag and drop actions, including to/from applications and the desktop space, provides a right-click context menu with options to “Open with…”, tooltips for reading truncated file/shortcut names, and more.
Now, the latest release expands the extension’s support with keyboard shortcuts for selecting desktop icons without the mouse:
- Multi-selection: hold Shift and use arrow keys
- Select and unselect files using Ctrl + Space
- HOME moves to the top-left icon
- END moves to the bottom-right icon
Accessibility improvements also feature in this update, with fixes to ensure the correct file name is read out (and only read out once) by screen readers when interacting with shortcut on the desktop space itself.
Rounding out the change set are new Arabic translations and (obviously) compatibility with GNOME 49.
These changes will be available out-of-the-box in Ubuntu 25.10 when it’s released later this year.
If you’re on an older version of Ubuntu you won’t get these changes as a software update from the repos, and you can’t install a newer version of the DING extension from GNOME Extensions (namespace conflicts since it’s the same extension).
You can download the latest version as a DEB package from the DING developer’s website.
Users on other distributions with GNOME Shell don’t need to futz. They can install the latest version of DING from the GNOME Extensions website.