Pop!_OS Tiling — Always Float

Stephen Cross
2 min readOct 1, 2020

I’m a fan of tiling window managers. Pop!_OS introduced tiling windows, known as Pop Shell, in version 20.04. While the Pop implementation is not as powerful and functional as a tiling windows manager, like i3 or Awesome, it’s a great start but needs some improvements. In my post, Pop!_OS Switch Workspaces with Super + Number, I recommend adding keyboard mapping to move between workspaces easier.

Some windows don’t work well in tiling mode. The Settings and Calculator applications work better as floating windows

The Pop Shell team is working on improvements for managing a combination of floating and tiling windows. [ UPDATE: Pop Shell has been updated — read more here]. In the meantime, you can define specific windows to open in floating mode by default. The .config/pop-shell/config.json file below defines the Settings window, “Gnome-control-center”, and Calculator, “Gnome-calculator”, to open in floating mode.

{
“float”: [
{
“class”: “Gnome-control-center”,
“title”: “”
},
{
“class”…

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Stephen Cross

A web developer for 25+ year. Drupal developer, podcaster and Linux enthusiast.