Shell out

A couple of days ago I uploaded a teaser with Pop Shell, but since then, Michael Murphy a.k.a mmstick, pushed a million patches in 10 minutes, and that is his f*cking average! And I want to say something about Michael! If that guy was ever starting to contribute upstream in Shell, we would have seen some totally crazy things happening in seconds! Fortunately for me, Michael is so good developer that by next year he will be in Amazon, and hopefully he will fix some issues on Polly :p Ouch! Another thing I want to quickly mention before the actual demo, is about the Pop!_OS and System 76 in general. So I often say that Pop!_OS is a better choice than Ubuntu, mostly because they go with Flatpak rather Snaps. And anyway, the technical features and future plans you can see them on this page. To me the most important factor that makes System 76 more reliable than Canonical, is their team! Very personal opinion, but I believe System 76 currently runs the most qualified team from any other desktop today.

01:03 - And of course they are the only hardware vendors too. A huge huge bonus! With all these boring things said, lets go to the demo! So first I will open a file manager that will consume the full free space, and then I want to show you some of the extension options. So we have these gaps, something that many people complained about on my first upload. To turn them off we can simply set them to “0”, although that is currently bugged so I can’t demo it. From the window titles option, we can turn off the titlebars on the server side decorations windows, which makes a perfect sense on a tiled environment. But I will leave that on for now. Okay, so.

01:45 - If we open a new window, that will get tiled next to the other! Now, we can resize them both from a single point, similar to Shell default behavior. Let me to open one more window, and if we want to move this window to the other side, we can drag it to the right, and now we get this. So if we drag this too, we will go back to our initial placement, and that was so smart move from me :p Just assume we achieved what we wanted, and lets continue! If we resize from a corner, it won’t really work, but things like those may get fixed on the initial release. But at least all windows will get resized from the horizontal handlers. Next we can do is to go into Window Management Mode with .

02:30 - With we can resize the selected window. With we can change the orientation of the selected window, and with arrows we can move the window on a different placement! With we can bring the windows chooser. Oh, and I love that yellow color! Probably was made for Pop theme, but I like it on Adwaita too. And with this selection we can now change orientation, or move it to a different place, pretty easy, pretty fast! From the window selection menu, we can also search and launch new applications. So Lollypop will now open here, and if I close the window next to it, Lollypop will get the available space.

03:13 - Another cool thing is that we can maximize a window simply by dropping it to the top edge. And dragging it back will revert it to its previous placement. And Michael fixed some more things since my last demo! For example, drag a window to the sides will now work as expected, plus everything looks fine with the animations! One thing I’d love to have, and actually I’m not even going to use this extension without it, is that I prefer if I could snap windows on this workspace, but having floating windows to the other workspaces. I’m not sure that’s something easy to get addressed, but I’m just saying! I’m not into tiling window managers, but before I close this video I want to reply to all these people saying to use i3, or Sway, or Awesome, or BSPWM, or whatever for the “true experience”. The thing is that we now have a much more powerful window manager, and I mean Mutter! And we also have a full desktop with some really good workspaces, and moreover, we have zero configuration and dot files! So in all honesty, SCREW YOU and YOUR REAL TWMs, and thank you for watching :) .