 Today I want to share with you one of the neatest GNOME shell extensions I think I've ever seen a couple of days ago the creator of this particular GNOME shell extension his name is Simon Schneegans He created a YouTube video about this extension and he also posted over on various Linux subreddits about this extension It's called flypie and let me switch over to this web browser here You can see the github page for flypie and it's licensed under a free license Free and open-source software licensed under the MIT license and what flypie is it's a GNOME shell extension for GNOME 40 or later So you can't be on older versions of GNOME 3, right? You need to be on GNOME 40 or later and what this is It's a menu system. It's kind of similar to the old GNOME PI menu program those of you familiar with that where you get this circular menu that appears on your desktop and then you know You can open sub circular menus Available to you in this little pie shaped menu. That's a really cool concept And what he does with flypie here is actually pretty neat because you can actually open your menus Or navigate through the menus in three different ways You can do it traditional way, which is just point and click with the mouse You can do what he calls marking mode where you're basically just dragging the cursor around through the menu system And it just you know opens everything for you and there's also what he calls turbo mode Which is more of just using the keyboard to open things and I'm gonna try all three modes here So let me switch over to a virtual machine that I've got a spun up here So this is manjaro with GNOME 40 and let's briefly talk about how to install a GNOME shell extension What you need to do is open your browser and navigate to this website extensions.gnome.org And then from there search for fly-pie Click on that and just make sure that this is toggled on you just slide on or off You know the extensions you're turning on and off So that's how you quickly install or uninstall extensions here inside GNOME Now when you first launch the browser You're probably gonna have a pop-up here on the website saying do you want to enable the GNOME extensions? Plug-in for Firefox in this case, so you do want to click yes on that But that's all you have to do it will install the plug-in itself And then immediately you should be able to turn on the fly-pie plug-in and then the default Keybinding for fly-pie to open I believe is control space I changed that to alt P but you can make this key binding to open the menu anything you want and the only thing I've changed is I think the main Icon and the center of the pie chart here was a either a smiley face or it might have been a star It was some weird phone like emoji that really didn't make much sense. It really didn't scream Hey, this is a menu. So what I did is I changed it to the main icon for Manjaro's menu systems Which of course is the Manjaro M icon there now the entries here in this menu were all here by default So you've got several different things here And I believe these are chosen as the default menu because he wants to show you a little bit of what is possible with fly-pie So you've got things like your bookmarks folder here. You know if you These are your file manager bookmarks So this is for the Nautilus file manager and you can navigate, you know to things like that But then you have things like Forward and backwards, you know these arrows here for previous workspace next workspace So if I click next workspace, you know, we just went to the second workspace If I get back in the menu system and go to previous workspace, of course We go back to the first workspace now how useful is it to have things like previous workspace next workspace? Close window is the X here and this is maximized window It's kind of hard to see these icons because they're light colored icons on a light background I probably would change either the background color or the color of the icons and you can change all of this We can change anything we want because this here fly pie settings if I click on that You have a really nice Like a settings manager here that you have all kinds of customization options from everything from the font font size font color background color The size of the icons the size that the icon zoom when you're you know moving around the the menu system and everything like that So it's really customizable It's one of those things especially those of you that love to tweak your desktop and you know make really cool Screenshots to be posted over at r slash Unix porn, you know You would love something like fly pie just because you could waste a lot of hours tweaking this thing Now I haven't done much other than change one setting I changed the font to something that was a little more readable for me here on manjaro So deja vu sands condensed bold and I also changed the color by default. It was black I changed it to a dark red just because I thought it fit the theme that I was using this a wallpaper that I was using But let me open the settings here and other than the settings tab Where you have various things that you can go in here and play with you have the menu editor Which is probably the very first thing you want to do is go into the menu and you have example menu here This is just the name of the menu out of the box and you click on the little edit pencil icon there And this is that menu that we see when I do all p in my case or control space by default And from here we can add and remove things. I do want to show you guys Next workspace and previous workspace what these are instead of this being a normal kind of run launcher Where it launches a program what these are representing are Shortcuts keyboard shortcuts. So when you click on the arrow what it is actually doing it is actually typing control alt Right arrow. So that is how this is being achieved. So you don't just launch programs with fly pie You can also have it be keyboard shortcuts for, you know, other keyboard actions as well And that's how he's achieving the previous workspace next workspace maximize close window Say close window is alt f4 the default Key binding in genome to close programs if I wanted to add something to this menu system I just click the plus sign here and from here you have various things you can add by default The main menu is the main menu in genome, which is you know this thing here Well, I guess I can't launch it right now because I've got this open but I closed that there that would be that menu I don't know why you would want a shortcut to that menu when you've installed fly pie though because fly pie seems like a better option You also have things like bookmarks, which was already there We also have frequently used applications recent files things like that But what I'm going to do is add a custom menu because I'm going to add a more traditional kind of menu system For example, in most Linux menu systems, you have things like a accessories category a games category internet office things like that So let's go ahead and add a internet category And then let's create a icon by default. It shows some hearts It'll choose some random emoji kind of thing for all of your custom menus But you're probably going to want to change it instead of going with whatever it randomly selects for you And you can you can search for any icon on the system in my case I'm going to type the word internet now. It's very slow This is because I guess it has to search through a ton of icons And I am doing this inside a virtual machine, but I don't think this is the virtual machine being slow I think this process of searching through You know thousands of icons on the machine for any that have internet as part of the name I I think that it's just a slow process and from here. I'll just pick a internet related icon So now we have internet as the title and then this icon as the icon and from here What you could do is edit this internet category and add things to it and from here What we probably want to do is launch an application And what we want to do, uh, I know firefox is installed That's the only program that I'm absolutely sure is here So I want the title to be firefox the icon I know firefox's icon is always firefox.ping or whatever it is on the system But if you needed to search for it, you could search for it And the command that you want to run when you click this icon Needs to be firefox, of course, let's see if that actually works I'm going to do my key binding to launch the menu Then I'm going to go into the internet category click it There is my firefox icon if I click it We should launch firefox and there we go And it doesn't make sense to have this sub menu with just one thing in it So let's go ahead and add another launch application And this time I'll call it giri giri is the email client that is installed And see if there is a giri icon called giri there is And the command it needs to run is giri and now that we've done that Let me get back into this internet category and now we have the two icons here including giri Which is not going to be set up to to work properly here in this VM Now remember the github mentioned there were three ways to actually navigate the menus point and click Marking mode and turbo mode and let me try these because I haven't played around with fly pie But I've played around with it for about two hours before starting this video But what I've been doing is just clicking everything, you know If I want to get into a category I just click on it and then I click on the icon But apparently what they're calling marking mode is just dragging through the menus So you just well, let me hit the key binding to launch the menu and from here If I click on that I hold it down and then I just And drag through until I yeah, you just keep going around I'm still holding the mouse down I can even go back to the manjaro window and get back into this and it's really kind of slick I mean that's that's actually kind of a fast way to to move around here Now you'd have to get kind of used to how that works because obviously You're going to make some mistakes when you're first trying this But I could actually see that being much faster than point click point click point click, you know Around the the menu system the other way to navigate the system was turbo mode And that's where you either use control shift or alt pick your favorite modifier key I guess and that's what you hold down when you're using your drawing gestures here So if I launch the menu system and this time I'm going to hold the alt key And then I'm moving the mouse wheel, but I'm just holding the alt key So it's kind of like the uh marking mode where you're dragging where you're holding the right click button down But instead I'm just holding a key down instead and actually that is a lot easier on your hand. I like that So I probably would do that I would just launch the menu and then I would hold the alt key and then just move the mouse Right and then just move the mouse and that actually is really slick Yeah, I like that. Uh, you know, I know it's a it's a menu system a lot of menu systems are just Visually, you know, kind of nice things to look at and this is you know, aesthetically pleasing I'm sure you could create some really nice effects with a fancy icon theme and you know, whatever colors you want to do with the menu system But I actually think it serves a bigger purpose than that because I really like How easy it is to navigate that system instead of having to point and click, you know, just dragging through things That's actually a rather nice touch. Yeah, so I'm just going to go ahead and play around a little bit I'm going to go back into the main menu here the what they call the example menu. I could change that name But you know, probably what I would do is I had to go ahead and create some more custom menus We created an internet category. I'd create an accessories category because there's typically an accessories category on every, uh, Linux menu system and then search for accessories again, it's going to be very slow There's going to be some input lag here because it's uh, doing a massive search through a whole bunch of icon sets They're probably installed and we found accessories and then let's pick an appropriate Accessories kind of icon. Let's go with the protractor there and that will be my accessories category And then of course I could edit that and add all your standard accessory programs Like your calculator your archive manager and things like that But I'm not going to do that on camera and for me personally I I know the close window button maximize button next workspace previous workspace Which is just to show that you can do these keyboard shortcuts as part of the menu system But they really serve no purpose You would be better off actually hitting the keyboard shortcut itself Then going into flypie and then clicking an icon to actually execute that keyboard shortcut So for me I probably would get rid of these how you remove things from the menu as you just drag That icon to the trash down here. So that got rid of next workspace. I'm going to get rid of previous workspace I'm going to get rid of close window. I'm going to get rid of maximize window And then I'm just going to go ahead and start populating my menu with how I like it So I'm going to do another custom menu and I'm going to take a few minutes here to Set this up kind of a traditional sort of way So I spent about 15 or 20 minutes putting together this menu system here So now I've got an accessories category with, you know, all your standard Linux accessories like your calculator and text editor terminal GNOME maps and your backup tool That's deja dupe g edit and things like that if I go back to the main menu system under internet I think I added firefox gearie. We have our contacts and transmission bit torn And now that I know that I can hold the alt key So when I launched this I just hold the alt key and now all I do is move the ball of my trackball mouse That is all I'm doing holding the alt key and moving the ball on my trackball mouse So that is really cool. So if I start dragging the trackball down to the accessories category and keep dragging it Once I hit a certain wall, it opens the accessories category and I just keep moving my trackball mouse around until I open a program Or until I drag it back toward that manjaro icon and go back to the main menu And maybe I wanted to go into the internet category instead. So that is how that works really really neat program Uh, let me actually launch something. Let me launch this terminal emulator. What is that the ranger file manager inside the terminal emulator? I also enabled wobbly windows inside ganome. There's a ganome extension for wobbly windows as well I just you know was nostalgic for the old wobbly windows that was very popular back in the ganome two days So that is just a little bit of what you can do here with flypie So flypie again is a ganome 40 extension So you can't use it on ganome three, but those of you that are on ganome 40 I think you're gonna find this a fantastic extension. I would go ahead and disable You know dash to dock and dash to panel and all that and I would just use flypie as my menu system If I had to critique one thing about flypie, I don't like the fact that it is a ganome shell extension I really think that the author of this Should seriously consider Porting this or creating a all new application that is a gtk menu system that would work on any gtk based desktop environment Because honestly this being a ganome shell extension. It's not going to last forever You know the next version of ganome could be out in a couple of months and it could break his extension I mean he would have to do major rewrites. He's probably going to be fighting with ganome the whole time He's developing his ganome shell extension. And I think that's unfortunate. I think that developers would be better served Just trying to avoid working with the ganome project as much as possible because with a menu system like this I don't really think you have to have this as part of ganome I think you could create this as its own standalone project and you probably get 10 times as many people using it Overall though if I had to give this thing a grade, I would give this thing an A plus Now before I go I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank the producers of this episode I need to thank Gabe James Mitchell Paul Scott. Wes Akami Allen Chuck commander angry to yokai David Dillon Gregory Heiko Lee Maxim Mike nitrix erion olexander peace arch and fedora polytech raver red prophet Stephen and willy These guys they're my highest tiered patrons over on patreon because without these guys This channel wouldn't be possible. The work I do wouldn't be possible It's also brought to you by each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen all these names you're seeing on the screen right now These are all my supporters over on patreon because I don't have any corporate sponsors It's just me and you guys the community if you like my work and want to support me Please subscribe to distro tube over on patreon. All right guys peace That's so much better than the ganome dash thingy