After a year of development, the release of the custom shell Material Shell 42 has been published, offering an implementation of the concepts of tiling and spatial window layout for GNOME. The project is designed as an extension for GNOME Shell and aims to simplify navigation and increase work efficiency by automating work with windows and predictable behavior of the interface. The code is written in TypeScript and distributed under the GPLv3 license. The release of Material Shell 42 provides support for running on top of GNOME 42.
The Material Shell uses a Spatial Model for switching between windows, which means dividing open applications into workspaces. Each workspace can contain multiple applications. Thus, a virtual grid of application windows is formed, in which the columns are applications, and the rows are workspaces. The user can switch the viewport by moving on the grid relative to the current cell, for example, you can move the viewport to the left or right to switch between applications in the same workspace, and up or down to switch between workspaces.
Material Shell allows you to group applications depending on the subject or tasks performed by adding new workspaces and opening applications in them, forming a user-friendly and predictable window space. All windows are tiled and do not overlap. It is possible to expand the current application to full screen, display side by side with other applications from the working area, display all windows in the form of columns or grids, as well as stack snapping of windows in an arbitrary form using horizontal and vertical pinning with neighboring windows.
The spatial model configured by the user is saved between restarts, which allows you to form a familiar environment with the user-selected pinning of elements. When an application is launched, its window is placed in the place previously selected for it, preserving the general order of the workspaces and the attachment of applications to them. For navigation, you can view the layout of the generated grid, in which all previously launched applications are shown in the places selected by the user, and clicking on the application icon in this grid will open the desired application in its place in the spatial model.
It can be controlled using a keyboard, touch screen or mouse. Interface elements are designed in Material Design style. Light, dark and basic (user selects the color) themes are provided. For mouse and touch screen control, the bar shown on the left side of the screen is used. The panel displays information about available workspaces and highlights the current workspace. At the bottom of the panel displays a variety of indicators, system tray and notification area.
To navigate through the windows of applications running in the current workspace, the top bar is used, which acts as a taskbar. In the context of spatial model management, the left panel is responsible for adding workspaces and switching between them, and the top panel is responsible for adding applications to the current workspace and switching between applications. The top bar is also used to control the tiling of windows on the screen.
Source: opennet.ru