Home / ubuntu / Questions / 1363460
Accepted
Katai
Asked: 2021-09-14 00:29:30 +0800 CST

Is there any way to label each desktop individually?

  • 772

I'm usually working with 3x3 Desktops, with the tendency to separate them by active projects or clients for the workday (for example, all consoles going to project A on one desktop, all consoles going to project B on another).

This is fine in most cases, but when there's a lot of stuff going on at once it can quickly become confusing.

Is there some way to label a Desktop? Either on the 3x3 Grid view (when switching around with CTRL+ALT+Arrows), some kind of gnome plugin to just add a Box with a word in it, or a custom background for each desktop?

Maybe there's an obvious solution, but I never really played around with gnome. I still use the defaults.

Gnome Shell: 3.28.4

Ubuntu: 18.04.5 LTS

gnome

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Alright, thanks to the comments and especially Rinzwind, I managed to find a solution:

    Turns out, I was already using Workspace Grid. While not obvious on how to do it, the extension offers support for custom labels:

    1. Install and activate the extension.
    2. Configure the extension - you can do this directly on the website (I didn't realize that). Make sure to turn workspace labels ON.

    enter image description here

    1. If you see the switcher now, it'll number each Workspace ("Workspace 1, 2, 3, etc"). Unless I memorize the numbers, that's not really useful at all. But there is a way to change the label.

    2. Open a console, type dconf-editor. Navigate to /org/gnome/desktop/wm/preferences/workspace-names. Set "Use default value" to OFF and add an array of labels.

    enter image description here

    Labels go from left to right, top to bottom. If you have a 3x3 grid, and want to label the bottom left workspace, it's the 7th index in the array. If you want to just remove the default naming "Workspace X" for a particular workspace, just use ' ' (space); an empty string '' won't work.

    That's it! Works like a charm, at least if you use workspace-grid. I'm not sure if it's properly supported on later versions of Gnome, as the 1-star comments imply that there are issues.

    Additional documentation can be found on https://github.com/zakkak/workspace-grid

    Please keep in mind that this extension is no longer in development.

    • 9