Getting the i3wm tiling experience in Gnome Desktop

Introduction

Want a tiling WM but still require the capabilities of the fully fledged gnome desktop?

So what is a tiling WM?
Tiling window managers provide a perfect to setup your windows on the screen so the whole screen real estate is used. i3WM is the best know tiling window managers. i3WM is generally highly dependent on keyboard use.

Using i3WM does require a learning curve and require some time to learn on how to setup and use it as a daily driver.

Learning how to use i3WM might be a story for another day but we want to use the features of a tiling WM on the GNOME Desktop.

Installing the Pop shell

sudo apt install git node-typescript make
git clone https://github.com/pop-os/shell.git
cd shell
make local-install

Setting up the Gnome Desktop to use Pop Shell

Enable the Pop Shell extension in Gnome Tweaks under Extensions.

Enable Window tiling to create window tiles so that they can automatically place themselves on the screen

These are the default shortcuts for the pop shell. You can change them from the keyboard settings if you want to.

You can visit the pop shell settings to set the gaps between your windows if you find it too big or too small.

So what does this help with?

Gnome doesn't really support quarter tiling, on really huge screens those who use windows already know that how much quarter tiling helps.

Comments

[Dhruva Srinivas]

Pop Shell is a great extension but it is still not compatible with GNOME 40 :(

[Sahil Arora]

I would also love to have the support for GNOME 40. I haven't myself used GNOME 40 yet, but i see 3 issues right now open in the repo. Hope to see they are fixed soon.