gnome-shell-wsmatrix VS argos

Workspace Matrix extension makes my day, every day.

I just had NixOS break in a weird way for me. Ok, it was more that Gnome 42.4 broke the wsmatrix extension, which caused Gnome to shit itself[1] on login.

It's a little bit of a double edged sword. NixOS lets me use pretty much straight upstream packages, which sometimes break due to not having thorough integration testing like a traditional distro would. On the other hand, I was able to just boot up an older configuration to get back to functional, and that let me figure out wtf was wrong.

[1]: https://github.com/mzur/gnome-shell-wsmatrix/issues/236

Implement the Workspace Matrix extension for GNOME https://github.com/mzur/gnome-shell-wsmatrix in Sway, possibly looking at Sway Overview for inspiration.

Hej, recently updated my laptop to 22.04 but after some years getting use to unity and 2 extra screens now seems i cannot find my way to have a decent wall of workspaces... i found a nice extension that works fine (https://github.com/mzur/gnome-shell-wsmatrix) but only seems to create the workspace wall on the latop screen and not on the other external screens...

Release info: https://github.com/mzur/gnome-shell-wsmatrix/releases

My main concern is a 2D grid for workspaces, with workspace previews in the workspace switcher popup. Workspace Matrix does an excellent job of adding this to GNOME.

it will assign a new font to the extension. Then you may use an icon font, such as Font Awesome, Icofont or icomoon (which also allows you to create your own!). You can then change the workspace names with dconf-editor with the characters from the font. PM me if you need any help :)

On GNOME there's a way to get native 2 dimensional workspaces, but AFAIK the only way to enable this is with an extension like workspace matrix. For ctrl+alt+arrow-like shortcuts be sure to set keybindings for switch-to-workspace-arrow and move-to-workspace-arrow in org.gnome.desktop.wm.keybindings. However, I had some issues with GNOME 40 like: - Changing workspaces with mouse scroll jumps to an adjacent workspace up/down (as expected). Without a device that has horizontal scroll (like a touchpad) you can't go to adjacent workspaces left/right. - There are multiple issues with the workspace thumbnails in the overview.

Ok, so, I'm using Workspace Matrix for a workspace grid.

Good observation.

Turning off extensions is where OP lost me. In the last year, the single biggest quality of life improvement for me has been discovering the Argos[0] extension, which basically lets you put whatever text/menus you want in the top bar by writing scripts that print to stdout. To save space, I hid the dock (I use [1] as a replacement alt-tab), so the top bar is the only piece of screen that isn't OS chrome.

On my top bar right now I have the time in four time zones (including the ever-important UTC to save a mental calculation when logging at logs), the name of the current Wifi access point, and some VPN details gleaned using a combination of ip r, ping, nc, and curl. Another extension shows free RAM. I look at them dozens of times a day.

[0] https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1176/argos/

[1] https://gist.github.com/cbd32/cbec9a32b32bd9e93b0d2696c71b5f...

I’ve heard this called “the defaults lifestyle” on the Software Defined Talk podcast. I’m forever locked out of nirvana because I have an iPhone but not a Mac, but that’s fine.

Occasionally plugins are worth the expense though. I finally discovered Argos[0] and I’m using it to show time in UTC and a couple other time zones. Super handy.

But if I try some new software and find that I have to tweak it a bunch to make it usable, that means the devs have different aesthetics and I should probably try something else.

[0] https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1176/argos/

I'm really surprised no one mentioned Argos

Currently, Argos extension (not developed since 3.32) holding the records for more than 13.8M downloads following by Dash to Dock extension with 6.2M downloads.

This is what I was referring to.

If you want, you could make the extension yourself via Argos https://github.com/p-e-w/argos using https://www.semicomplete.com/projects/xdotool/ or using one of these https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/38867/is-it-possible-to-retrieve-the-active-window-process-title-in-gnome/122870

Hey Recently I found this widget named Kargos that shows terminal command output as a widget it uses Gnome's argos and BitBar (Mac) This gives a very nice opportunity to make your own custom widget.

Argos

There is Argos. However, maintenance is unclear since the original developer steps down.