So you’re looking for a quick and easy way to change workspaces in Ubuntu 22.04 LTS using nothing but your mouse.

You’ll (hopefully) already know you can click on the Activities button in the top bar. This opens the overview screen that shows all active workspaces. Click on a workspace and you’re taken straight to it. Relatively easy, but a bit more involved than just switching instantly.

You can also hold the super key and scroll on your mouse scroll wheel. This will cycle between workspaces directly, no overview involved.

However, that does require you to use a mouse with a scroll wheel, and it still involves keyboard shortcuts (and if you’re fine with keyboard shortcuts you can press super + alt + left/right arrows to move workspaces instead).

But if you’re reading and thinking “yes, this is exactly my use case: switch workspaces using a mouse only”, you should check out the new Workspace Switch Buttons GNOME Shell extension.

There are plenty of great GNOME Shell extensions out there, ranging from add-ons that dramatically alter the way your desktop works, through to smaller, more thoughtful tweaks that improve a specific interaction point.

Workspace Switch Buttons is the latter type.

All it does is replace the “Activities” button with left and right arrows that, when clicked, switch to next workspace in sequence:

This is all it does – but all it needs to

Now, I’m certainly not suggesting this is an “everyone should install this” extension. So to those reading this post and thinking “I don’t see an issue here, tbh” — you don’t need this.

But if you are someone who finds the Activities button lacking (no surprise; it’s why GNOME devs revamped it in GNOME 45), and you want a frictionless, pointer-led way to page between workspaces, this is as good an implementation as any I’ve come across.

It’s not a million miles way from the Space Bar GNOME Shell extension that I featured on OMG! Linux earlier this year, but rather than giving you i3-style workspace numbers (and a lot of advanced options) you get fixed left/right arrows, and nowt else.

If you think this could add to your workflow, go check it out.

You can install it from GNOME extensions and as it supports GNOME 42, 43 & 44 (yup, it doesn’t support GNOME 45) it’ll work great on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS.


GNOME Extensions