Alphabetical App Grid GNOME Extension

• Restore the alphabetical ordering of the app grid, removed in GNOME 3.38
• Supports GNOME 3.38+, earlier versions are untested, and unnecessary
• Get the extension from here
• This project is licensed under GPL 3.0
• Any donations are greatly appreciated :)

Install the extension from releases:

• Extract the zip to ~/.local/share/gnome-shell-extensions/AlphabeticalAppGrid@stuarthayhurst/
• Reload GNOME
• Enable the extension

Install the extension from source:

• Make sure the install dependencies are installed
• make build
• make install
• Reload GNOME
• Enable the extension

Build system usage:

• Common targets: Regular build system targets to build, install and uninstall

  • make build: Compiles GSettings schemas and creates extension zip
  • make check: Runs checks on built extension zip
  • make install: Installs the extension
  • make uninstall: Uninstalls the extension

• Development targets: These targets are aimed at developers and translators

  • make clean: Deletes extension zip, locale and automatic backups
  • make gtk4: Creates a GTK 4 UI from the GTK 3 UI file (Should be run after any changes to files in ui/)
  • make translations: Updates translations
  • make compress: Losslessly compresses any .pngs in docs/
    • Allows passing COMPRESSLEVEL="-oX", where x is an integer between 0-7
  • make release: Updates the GTK 4 UI, translations, then creates and checks an extension zip
    • Calls make gtk4 translations compress build check
    • Supports any variables / arguments supported by these targets
    • Also allows passing VERSION="XX", where XX is the version to update metadata.json to
  • make package: Creates the extension zip from the project's current state (Only useful for debugging)

Install dependencies:

• gettext
• gnome-extensions
• libglib2.0-bin

Build dependencies: (Only required if running make release)

• All install dependencies
• sed (make translations)
• libgtk-4-bin (make gtk4)
• optipng (make compress)

What happened to the show favourites option?

• Maintaining this feature was going to end up complicated and messy
• It was also out of scope, and this extension did the job better
• With this in mind, the feature was removed in release v16

Want to help?

• Help with the project is always appreciated, refer to docs/CONTRIBUTING.md to get started
• Documentation, code, translations and UI improvements are all welcome!

Bug reporting / debugging:

• If you were simply told "Error" while installing, reboot and if there's still an issue
  • When installing an extension from GNOME's extension site, this is normal
• A log of what the extension is doing is very helpful for fixing issues
• The extension logs to the system logs when enabled, which can be accessed with journalctl /usr/bin/gnome-shell
• A live feed of GNOME's logs can be accessed with journalctl /usr/bin/gnome-shell -f -o cat
• To enable logging, the setting can be found under the Developer settings section of the extension's settings:

Credits:

• scripts/update-po.sh and scripts/update-pot.sh were derived from Fly-Pie, originally licensed under the MIT license

Screenshots: