How to create GNOME Application Overview folders

Get your GNOME application overview a bit more organized with user-created folders.

How to create GNOME Application Overview folders
Get your GNOME application overview a bit more organized with user-created folders.

GNOME Application Overview folders come from the ‘long-awaited functions’ office. What are these hitherto mythical creatures? Simple. In the GNOME application overview you have startup programs for every user-oriented application installed on your system. You will also find a number of standard folders, each of which contains application starters. These default folders are System, Utilities, etc. Until recently, end users could not create their own folders.

Although this may not seem like a major problem, that overview can become very busy if you have installed many applications. Instead of browsing through one or two home pages, you can view five or seven pages. Of course you can always quickly search for the relevant startup program, but why not seriously organize yourself and create your own folders?

Fortunately, with the release of GNOME 3.34, users can now easily create their own folders. I’m going to show you how to do that.

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What you need

All you need for this to work is a running instance of every Linux distribution – such as Pop! _OS 19.10 or Ubuntu 19.10 – which contains the latest release of GNOME. Of course you also have to install some apps.

How to make folders

The GNOME developers have made this incredibly easy. To create a folder, follow these steps:

  1. Open the Application overview by clicking the Show applications button on the GNOME dashboard or by pressing the Super button on your keyboard.
  2. Find an application launcher that you want to group with another.
  3. Click and drag application B to application A (Figure A).

Figure A

Create an EBOOK folder with the start-up programs of the E-book Viewer and the E-book Editor.

Once the folder has been created, it will be moved to the end of your application overview, with “Unnamed folder” as the titleFigure B).

Figure B

Our newly created folder.

To rename the folder, right click on it and in the resulting text area (Figure C), enter the new name.

Figure C

After the folder name has been changed, it will be placed in alphabetical order in the Application overview (Figure D).

Figure D

Our newly renamed folder.

And that’s all you have to do to create folders in the GNOME application overview. While this feature may not make your admin life any easier, it will certainly make working with the GNOME desktop considerably more efficient. And who doesn’t like a good efficiency limitation here?

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