Ever wondered how to swiftly alternate between workspaces in Ubuntu 22.04 LTS utilizing your mouse?
Chances are, you are aware of the Activities button located on the top bar. When you click on this button, it prompts the overview screen that displays all the workspaces that are presently active. By clicking on a specific workspace, you’re able to navigate directly to it. Although this process isn’t necessarily troublesome, it does require some extra effort as compared to an immediate switch.
Alternatively, while ensuring the super key is pressed, you can rotate your mouse’s scroll wheel to sift through the different workspaces.
However, this alternative assumes the use of a mouse that is equipped with a scroll wheel. This method also incorporates keyboard shortcuts. In order to alleviate these assumptions, consider pressing super + alt + left/right arrow keys for workspace transition.
If you’re still reading and thinking “yes, this exactly my use case”, then you should consider examining the new tool known as Workspace Switch Buttons which operates within the GNOME Shell extension
There is a plethora of impressive GNOME Shell extensions ranging from add-ons that drastically transform the functioning of your desktop to smaller, carefully considered tweaks that enhance specific interaction points.
The Workspace Switch Buttons falls squarely into the category of the latter.
Its singular purpose is to conceal the “Activities” button, substituting it with left and right arrows for workspace switching:
To those at the back, dying to sound off in the comments, please note: I’m not suggesting this is an “everyone should install this” extension. Anyone reading the first half of this post and thinking “Don’t see an issue here, tbh” doesn’t need this.
But if you are someone who finds the Activities button a little lacking (no surprise; it’s why GNOME devs revamped it in GNOME 45), and wants a simple pointer-led way to page between workspaces, this is as good an implementation as I’ve come across.
It’s not a million miles way from the Space Bar GNOME Shell extension that I featured on OMG! Linux earlier this year, but rather than giving you i3-style workspace numbers (and a lot of advanced options) you get fixed left/right arrows, and nowt else.
So if you think this could buff your workflow, do check it out.
You can install it from GNOME extensions, and it supports GNOME 42, 43 & 44 (yup, it doesn’t support GNOME 45).