Gnome extensions
Last updated: 2026—02—01
As polished as Gnome is nowadays, there are a tonne of things missing from it.
The devs say that that's by design, and that you can customise it to your preferences & needs with the Gnome Extensions.
However, every Gnome update manages to introduce changes that break most extensions.
That being said, here are the extensions I use.
Links will take you to the GitHub or GitLab location, because who knows when an extension might get removed from the Gnome Extensions store?
Click on the name to see details on this page, or click the GitHub link to go to their repo page.
Light Style (built-in)
System Monitor (built-in)
Window Navigator (built-in)
And, finally, Save Desktop. It's an app, not an extension, but its primary purpose is to back up all your desktop settings, including extensions, wallpapers, and other settings.
More details
Absolutely necessary if you use any apps that have system tray indicators. Somehow (?) the Gnome devs forgot to include support for this. This extension literally imports the function from KDE and Ubuntu.
Read more: App Indicators, Status, Tray
Gnome Shell is famous for its hot corner: hitting the top-left corner with your mouse cursor activates the overview, exposing open windows and an app launcher dock. However, this hot corner does not work on second monitors — and indeed, if you add a monitor to the left of your primary display, the hot corner moves to the far left corner. Obviously ridiculous and obviously an oversight, the devs left it to someone else to create an extension to solve this bug. CHC allows customisation of the hot corners, and CHC-E brings more features. I now have three hot corners.
Read more: Hot Corners
This indicator gives you access to the last x number of Ctrl+C copies you made, a la Windows's Win+V shortcut. It doesn't always work perfectly, but I think the bugs are not in this extension but actually within the apps and how they handle clipboard interaction.
Dash to Panel and Dash to Dock offer similar functionality, although Dash to Panel appears to be far superior in terms of customisability (which makes sense, because it was originally developed by Zorin OS). The only problem I've seen so far is that the font colour is hard to make out when changing between the Dash Overview and the desktop view, and the same case when changing between Light and Dark modes, although this is only when using the "Light Style" Gnome extension that makes the top panel and panel menus use a light theme style.
Yeah, this really isn't built into Gnome. There is no way to disconnect from a WiFi network without either choosing a new one or disabling your WiFi.
An emoji input panel that works regardless of what app you're in. The system-level inputs are always difficult to sort out properly, because of various teething incompatibilities between display manager (Wayland, X, XWayland, KWin), desktop shell (Gnome, KDE, Hyprland etc), input method (desktop's own, ibus, fcitx5, etc), the app you're trying to use (notable issues with chromium, electron, wine, qt under gnome, gnome under qt), and idk what else but basically it's complicated and messy and you're better off using a desktop shell extension that resides at the user level. Note that Emoji Copy works by copying the chosen emoji into your clipboard and pasting it immediately (sometimes doesn't work), so this will replace your most-recently-copied clipboard item.
Read more about using emoji in Linux: Emoji Input
I just use this to slow down the animations slightly. No reason other than I like to see the animations more slowly, which can (sometimes) serve to make me slow down in my mind. Note that Gnome's method of handling keyboard inputs as shell function shortcuts seems to depend upon the current state of the animation, which behaves a bit unexpectedly if you make the interface animations slower.
As with all other Gnome problems, the fundamentally necessary component of typing any language that doesn't use a simple linear input mode — so that'd be languages used by several BILLION PEOPLE (Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Hindi, Indic languages, Brahmic languages, etc etc etc) — the language input method panel, is simply not available in Gnome. Some kind soul has written an extension to support the one from KDE, kimpanel, thankfully. Good job, Gnome Devs. How very White Patriarchal Colonialist of you.
Read more about input methods: Input Methods - Fcitx5 (Asian languages)
Because, yet again, Gnome itself is lacking in settings, so there's literally no way to re-organise the panel menu items. Lilypad mostly works fine.
Because — you guessed it — Gnome has no settings for this. This extension allows tweaking of the Quick Settings panel and the Notifications-Date-Time panel. The defaults are "fine" as long as you don't actually have any items in your calendar — if you do, the schedule section is literally too long for the screen. And if you have the Weather app installed, it'll appear here too, on the long side of the panel. This extension lets you move stuff around a bit. It also lets you add things like the media transport widget to the menu and a per-app volume control which connects to the system's per-app volume control.
If you bind a keyboard shortcut to an application and press it when the application is already running, it will either launch a new instance if the app allows it, or — it will do absolutely nothing. This is stupid af. I bound Ctrl+Shift+Esc to the system monitor. Run or Raise fixes this stupidity by checking if the app is already running, launching it if it's not, and switching to it if it is. There are a few other parameters you can set too, like choosing if the workspace switches to the location of the app or if the app comes to your location. It is a bit more manual than other extensions, but read the guide and you'll be fine.
Read more: Raise window if app is already running
Guess what? This enables basic tiling features — snapping windows into quarters — that Windows has had for literally more than 12 years, since Windows 8.1. Linux has also had it since 2014.
Finally an extension that actually brings proper gesture support and functionality to Gnome! There have been a variety of apps and extensions in the past, but I only had limited success with each of them, and all got broken after a Gnome update. This one works perfectly on one laptop, running CachyOS, but the overview and workspace switching doesn't work on my Garuda. Not sure if this is due to a conflict with other extensions though — I'll test it out.
Read more: Gestures on a touchpad
Touchpad scrolling too fast? Using Wayland and Gnome? Read: Touchpad scroll slower
Transparent Window (v2)
This makes the current window transparent when you click on the item in the Gnome panel. Unfortunately it's not very convenient, as you can only set a transparency percentage in the Extension Settings window and then use that percentage every time. I used to use customisable window transparency all the time in Windows, with the application AltSnap, but unfortunately this hasn't yet been achieved in Wayland (in Gnome anyway).
Light Style
Light Style is built-in to Gnome's own extensions package. This provides a light theme style for the Gnome panel and panel menus. Idk why this isn't built into Gnome's settings.
System Monitor
System Monitor is built-in to Gnome's own extensions package. This is a pretty handy way to quickly see the usage of your CPU, RAM, and upload & download speeds. There are other extensions but I found them to be too complicated or heavy, or take up too much horizontal space.
Window Navigator
Window Navigator is built-in to Gnome's own extensions package. This allows you to use the dash overview with keyboard shortcuts, by selecting windows using Alt+number and workspaces using Ctrl+number.
And, finally, Save Desktop. It's an app, not an extension, but its primary purpose is to back up all your desktop settings, including extensions, wallpapers, and other settings such as those managed by dconf keys. I have installed it but I haven't tested how well it transfers between computers yet. It's available as a flatpak on Flathub, but if you're using Arch then it's also available in the repos (perhaps AUR; I can't check cos the AUR is down while I'm writing this).
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