GNOME Shell Extension: Outta Space

This GNOME Shell extension can be seen as a minimalistic extension that enhances the GNOME Shell for space usage on smaller screens (e.g. Laptop displays or Extreme Multihead setups).

Features

The Outta Space GNOME Shell extension combines the features of the following other extensions and/or programs:

• pixel-saver
• hidetopbar

Planned Features

It would be nice to extend this extension with the features of the following programs, because they would integrate nicely with Extreme Multihead setups and are much better in place within a GNOME Shell extension.

• clipboard-indicator
• synergy

Requirements

This GNOME Shell extension requires gnome-shell version 3.30+ and xprop version 1.2.3+. The xprop tool is required to allow maximized windows to be displayed without window decorations.

Wayland support is only possible with GTK+4 and later versions, as the necessary API will land inside GTK and can't be realized via alternative APIs or external toolkits.

See the hide titlebar not respected in wayland issue for details.

AUR Installation (Arch Linux)

trizen -S gnome-shell-extension-outta-space-git;

Manual Installation (Arch Linux)

git clone https://github.com/cookiengineer/gnome-shell-extension-outta-space.git;

cd ./gnome-shell-extension-outta-space/package/arch;

makepkg -s;

sudo pacman -U gnome-shell-extension-outta-space-*.pkg.tar.xz;

Development Help

Use the [Alt]+[F2] and r trick to restart the GNOME shell.

Sadly, looking glass (the lg GNOME command) is a major design fail when it comes to debugging extensions, because its window will stay on top and keep the focus, so you cannot do anything while inspecting the GTK tree.

In order to work with the extension's source code, you can also symlink the /source folder into your local shell extensions like so:

cd $HOME/.local/share/gnome-shell/extensions;

ln -s ~/Software/cookiengineer/gnome-shell-extension-outta-space/source outta-space@cookie.engineer;

Debugging Instructions:

1. Enable the Outta Space extension in gnome-tweaks.
2. Debug the extension by watching the output using journalctl.
3. Restart the gnome-shell after code changes via [Alt]+[F2] and r, the output in the "Debug Terminal session" will change on-the-fly.

journalctl /usr/bin/gnome-shell -f -o cat;

License

GPL3