Forge

Forge is a GNOME Shell extension that provides tiling/window management.

Features

• Tree-based tiling with vertical and horizontal split containers similar to i3-wm
• Vim-like keybindings for navigation/swapping windows/moving windows in the containers
• Drag and drop tiling
• Support for floating windows, smart gaps and focus hint
• Customizable shortcuts in extension preferences
• Some support for multi-display
• Tiling support per workspace
• Update hint color scheme from Preferences
• Stacked tiling layout
• Works on GNOME 3.36+ (feature-freeze) and 40. X11 and Wayland
• Swap current window with the last active window
• Auto Split or Quarter Tiling
• Show/hide tab decoration via keybinding https://github.com/forge-ext/forge/issues/180
• Window resize using keyboard shortcuts

Installation

• Extensions GNOME site: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/4481/forge/
• Download/clone the source and make install, restart gnome-shell after or make dev.
• AUR Package: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/gnome-shell-extension-forge - thanks to @Radeox
• Fedora Package: https://packages.fedoraproject.org/pkgs/gnome-shell-extension-forge/gnome-shell-extension-forge/ - thanks to @carlwgeorge

Forge Keybinding Defaults

See the acceptable key combinations on the wiki

For any shortcut conflicts, the user has to manually configure those for now from the GNOME Control Center > Keyboard > Customize Shortcuts. https://github.com/forge-ext/forge/issues/37

Forge Override Paths

• Window Overrides: $HOME/.config/forge/config/windows.json
• Stylesheet Overrides: $HOME/.config/forge/stylesheet/forge/stylesheet.css

GNOME Defaults

GNOME Shell has built in support for workspace management and seems to work well - so Forge will not touch those.

User is encouraged to bind the following:

• Switching/moving windows to different workspaces
• Switching to numbered, previous or next workspace

Development

• The main branch contains gnome-4x code.
• The legacy and gnome-3-36 are the same and is now the source for gnome-3x.

Local Development Setup

• Install NodeJS 16+
• Install gettext
• Run npm install
• Commands:

# Compile and override the gnome-shell update repo
make dev

# Or run below, and restart the shell manually
make build && make debug && make install

# X11 - build from source and restarts gnome-shell
make test-x

# Wayland - build from source and starts a wayland instance (no restart)
make test-wayland

# Formatting, when you do npm install, 
# husky gets installed should force prettier formatting during commit

npm run format

Contributing

• Please be nice, friendly and welcoming on discussions/tickets.
• See existing issues or file a new ticket with title bug: short description if it doesn't exist.

Credits

Thank you to:

• Forge extension contributors
• Michael Stapelberg/contributors for i3
• System76/contributors for pop-shell
• ReworkCSS/contributors for css-parse/css-stringify