Technology Tales

Adventures & experiences in contemporary technology

Dealing with the Lack of Categories in the Application Overview Screen for GNOME Shell 3.8

10th July 2013

One thing that I like to do is peruse the installed applications on any computer system. In most cases, this is simple enough to do but there are some who appear to believe in doing away with that in favour of text box searching. It also seems that the GNOME have fallen into that trap with version 3.8 of GNOME Shell. You could add the Applications Menu extension that is formally part of the GNOME Shell Classic interface and I have done this too. However, that has been known to freeze the desktop session so I am not that big a big fan of it.

However, there is a setting that brings back those application categories in the overview screen and it can be set using dconf-editor. After opening up the application, navigate to org > gnome > shell using the tree in the left hand panel of the tool. Editing the app-folder-categories entry in the right hand panel is what adds the categories back for you. The default is [‘Utilities’, ‘Sundry’] and this needs to be changed to [‘Utilities’, ‘Games’, ‘Sundry’, ‘Office’, ‘Network’, ‘Internet’, ‘Graphics’, ‘Multimedia’, ‘System’, ‘Development’, ‘Accessories’, ‘System Settings’, ‘Other’].

Once the above has been completed, a change is noticeable in that you get a list of categories in the application overview screen and a split of application icons in the middle and categories down the right hand side. Clicking on a category brings up a new panel that contains the application within it and this can be closed again. Cycling through the categories is a process of opening and closing the different panels. The behaviour may be changed but the functionality remains and I have heard that this will be polished further in release 3.10 of GNOME Shell.

For those wanting to to exit all of this and get something like the old GNOME 2, it is possible to add the Classic Session. In Fedora 19, it’s a matter of issuing something like the following command:

sudo yum -y install gnome-classic-session

In reality, this is a case of adding a number of extensions and changing the panel colour from black to grey but it works without needing the category tweak that I described above. The Application Menu extension does need more stability hardening before I’d trust it completely though. There’s no point having a nicer interface if it’s going to freeze up on you too often.

Comments:

  • zimon says:

    Thanks.

    Is it somehow possible tto also have an “ALL category/drawer”, where then all applications would be showing? Suppose if some app belongs to many category and cannot remember nor guess the right one, don’t remember the app name (for the string search), or just would like to browse all.

    So having both ways, both category view and ALL view?

  • Rahul Chavan says:

    great

  • All the views that you find expressed on here in postings and articles are mine alone and not those of any organisation with which I have any association, through work or otherwise. As regards editorial policy, whatever appears here is entirely of my own choice and not that of any other person or organisation.

  • Please note that everything you find here is copyrighted material. The content may be available to read without charge and without advertising but it is not to be reproduced without attribution. As it happens, a number of the images are sourced from stock libraries like iStockPhoto so they certainly are not for abstraction.

  • With regards to any comments left on the site, I expect them to be civil in tone of voice and reserve the right to reject any that are either inappropriate or irrelevant. Comment review is subject to automated processing as well as manual inspection but whatever is said is the sole responsibility of the individual contributor.