An AI-maintained fork of Forge, the GNOME Shell extension that provides i3/sway-style tiling window management.
This fork addresses bugs and adds features while the upstream project seeks a new maintainer. Contributions here are intended to be upstreamed when possible. Thanks to @jmmaranan and all original contributors for creating this excellent extension.
- Works on GNOME 40+ (X11 and Wayland)
- Tree-based tiling with vertical and horizontal split containers similar to i3-wm and sway-wm
- Vim-like keybindings for navigation/swapping windows/moving windows in the containers
- Drag and drop tiling
- Support for floating windows, smart gaps and focus hint
- Customizable shortcuts in extension preferences
- Some support for multi-display
- Tiling support per workspace
- Update hint color scheme from preferences
- Stacked tiling layout
- Swap current window with the last active window
- Auto Split or Quarter Tiling
- Show/hide tab decoration via keybinding
- Window resize using keyboard shortcuts
This fork includes significant improvements over the upstream version:
- Keybindings cheatsheet overlay - Quick reference for all shortcuts (
Super + ?) - Portable config sync - Export/import settings and keybindings for backup or sharing
- Arrow key navigation - Arrow keys work alongside vim-style hjkl bindings
- Floating window rules UI - Manage floating window rules directly in preferences
- Screen edge margins - Configurable gaps for compatibility with panels/docks
- Additional keybindings - Config reload, evenly distribute windows, workspace monocle, and more
- More customization - Border radius, tab margins, default layout, adjustable gap limits
- Monitor exclusion - Option to exclude specific monitors from tiling
- Window resize and focus navigation fixes
- App-specific fixes for Chrome, Brave, Steam, Blender, ddterm, and others
- Stacked/tabbed container behavior improvements
- Preview hints and border rendering fixes
- Cross-workspace window operations
- Preferences saving and theme handling
- Comprehensive unit test suite (823 tests, ~62% coverage)
- Refactored architecture with extracted modules (command.js, workspace.js, monitor.js)
- Experimental options disabled by default for stability
- Does not support dynamic workspaces
- Does not support vertical monitor setup
Build from source:
# Install dependencies (Node.js 20+ and gettext required)
npm install
# Development build: compile and install to ~/.local/share/gnome-shell/extensions/
make dev
# Production build: compile, install, enable extension, restart shell
make prodAfter installation, log out and log back in (or restart GNOME Shell on X11 with Alt+F2, then r).
- Window Overrides:
$HOME/.config/forge/config/windows.json - Stylesheet Overrides:
$HOME/.config/forge/stylesheet/forge/stylesheet.css
GNOME Shell has built in support for workspace management and seems to work well - so Forge will not touch those.
User is encouraged to bind the following:
- Switching/moving windows to different workspaces
- Switching to numbered, previous or next workspace
- Install Node.js 20+
- Install
gettext - Run
npm install - Commands:
# Compile and install to extension directory
make dev
# Or run below, and restart the shell manually
make build && make debug && make install
# X11 - build from source and restarts gnome-shell
make test-x
# Wayland - build from source and starts a wayland instance (no restart)
make test-wayland
# Run unit tests
npm test
# Formatting (husky pre-commit hooks enforce this)
npm run formatSee the upstream discussion about the path to merging this fork back into the main project.
Thank you to:
- The original Forge developers - @jmmaranan and all upstream contributors who created this extension
- Michael Stapelberg/contributors for i3
- System76/contributors for pop-shell
- ReworkCSS/contributors for css-parse/css-stringify