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I like to work with many open terminal windows at the same time. At work I have to cope with Windows, but I use Ubuntu at home. Sadly, the experience of finding a specific terminal window on GNOME is much worse in GNOME than in Windows.

In Windows, I can hover over the mini-preview on the bottom of my screen and the real windows is overlayed semi-transparently so I know exactly which window this is. Even more important, the ordering of the terminals always stays the same.

GNOME just gives me the mini-preview where I can't read the contents, so I have to click first and find out it was the wrong one later. Even worse, more often than not on my next try the ordering is different than before and I find myself trying the same wrong window more than once, making it very hard to continue working where this should be elementary.

Are there any GNOME Shell extensions or settings to improve this workflow?

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  • I use terminator because of that pretty annoying issue. It's a multi-window terminal emulator. You may check it out.
    – Kev Inski
    Oct 26, 2018 at 6:49
  • Thanks for the hint @KevInski, I think I will go with DashToPanel for now, but I will also check out terminator. Oct 26, 2018 at 9:15

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You may use the GNOME shell extension called Dash to Panel.

An icon taskbar for the Gnome Shell. This extension moves the dash into the gnome main panel so that the application launchers and system tray are combined into a single panel, similar to that found in KDE Plasma and Windows 7+. A separate dock is no longer needed for easy access to running and favorited applications.
enter image description here

Amongst various other options, this extension shows larger preview for application windows on hover and also static ordering for window previews.

For more info, visit the extension's GitHub page.

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  • Thanks, that does make it better. I am not convinced I like to have it all at the bottom, but that's certainly acceptable. It looks like it's not possible to move the panel to the left, is it? Oct 26, 2018 at 9:14
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    @firefrorefiddle No, it only lets you place the panel at the top or bottom. The developer explains the reason here ("Dash-to-panel has to contain all of the gnome shell widgets (Activities button, clock, status menu), as well as countless other 3rd party extensions, none of which have been designed for display in a vertical layout.").
    – pomsky
    Oct 26, 2018 at 9:25

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