Plaid — A polished, fluid Tiling window manager for Gnome 50+

Plaid is a tiling window manager for GNOME Shell. Tiling, borders, rounded corners, window blur and plenty more.

Full docs live on the wiki.

Features

• Four layouts: Dwindle (BSP), Master-stack, Centered Master-stack, and Floating. Per workspace layouts.

Plaid-layouts.webm

• Configurable gaps: Window gaps plus per-edge single-window gaps.

• Gradient borders: Shader-drawn, three directions, animated rotation, active/inactive colors, focus-aware.

Plaid-animated-gradient-borders.webm

• Rounded corners: Window content masked to the border radius.

Plaid-rounded-corners.webm

• Window blur: Pure-GJS blur (mutter's own Gaussian kernel) with rounded corners — no bundled C library.

Plaid-window-blur.webm

• Keybinds: Focus movement, swaps, resizing, floats, workspaces, scratchpad, layout cycling, and more.

• Float rules: Per-app and per-title floating.

• DDT Plaid Drop Down Terminal: Toggle a terminal (configurable command, default ghostty) that drops from the top of the work area at a configurable height, with full Flair and live height updates.

Plaid-DDT.webm

• BGAPP Plaid Background App: Run applications as non-interactive backgrounds.
• Terminal running cava, pipes, you name it. ghostty -e cava
• MPV for video backgrounds. mpv --loop --panscan=1.0 /yur/mum.mp4
• Firefox with --kiosk mode. firefox --kiosk https://example.com

Plaid-BGAPP.webm

• Plaid Welcome: Plaid does serious hokus pokus, a few moments to ready your session.

• PWP Plaid Workspace Pill: The top bar's workspace indicator becomes a pill — visible workspace numbers, active workspace's app icon and the focused window's title — while the overview and app switcher stay stock GNOME.

Plaid-PWP.webm

• PTS Plaid Terminal settings: Plaid settings as shell functions.

Plaid-cli.webm

• Dynamic workspaces ready: built on GNOME's dynamic-workspaces behavior: workspaces appear and disappear with your content, no fixed slot count.

• Maximize respects gaps: Maximizing a window fills the work area within the per-edge gaps instead of flush to the edges; floating windows restore their exact original geometry on toggle.

• PSL Plaid Scratch Layer: stash any window (it minimizes away) and toggle it back instantly. Scratched windows have an additional yellow border.

Plaid-PSL.webm

Install

gnome-extensions install plaid@plyply99.zip

While running, Plaid disables Gnome edge-tiling and maximize keybindings (restored when disabled).

Window blur

Window blur is a pure-GJS Clutter.Effect that renders mutter's own Gaussian kernel (the same shader used by GNOME Shell's built-in blur) through cached offscreen buffers, with Plaid's rounded-corner cut in the final composite. No bundled C library, no extra dependencies, no restart required after install.

Report bugs / contribute

Plaid is in active community testing — your reports make it better. If something misbehaves, open an issue and include this journal output (it tells us exactly what Plaid was doing):

journalctl -b -o cat | grep '\[plaid\]'

Multi-monitor setups are especially valuable to test. Feature ideas and pull requests are welcome: github.com/Plyply99/Plaid/issues

Plaid is built for those who Love Gnome and love a tiling workflow, with LOTS of bling.

Welcome, to Plaid.

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