Disabling edge tiling on GNOME 3.26 / Ubuntu 17.10

Edge tiling? ^

It’s that thing where when you drag a window so it hits the edge of the screen, GNOME offers to maximise the window. Generally the number of times I will knowingly want to maximise a window by dragging it to the top of the screen is 0, while the number of times it happens accidentally is over 9,000 by lunch time.

Things that work ^

$ dconf write /org/gnome/mutter/edge-tiling false

It should take effect immediately.

If you like a pointy clicky way to do it then install dconf-editor package and run dconf-editor, but really all you will do is click down the tree orggnomemutter and then toggle edge-tiling so I don’t really see the point.

Things that people on the Internet say work, but don’t – a non-exhaustive list ^

These suggestions silently fail to do anything, as far as I can see. They may have been correct for earlier versions of GNOME, but I am using GNOME on Ubuntu 17.10 and they didn’t work for me.

dconf write /org/gnome/shell/extensions/classic-overrides/edge-tiling false
gsettings set org.gnome.shell.overrides edge-tiling false
dconf write /org/gnome/shell/overrides/edge-tiling false

10 thoughts on “Disabling edge tiling on GNOME 3.26 / Ubuntu 17.10

    1. ertuzio, I’m not quite sure what you mean. Do you mean the background colour of the root window? Or the colour of the tiling highlight when you move a window to the edge?

  1. Sadly none of this works for me. I can read the values as false for both mutter and gnome shell overrides, using dconf and/or gsettings, and they’re each false. It still keeps stupidly maximizing windows when the cursor holding the window hits the top or side edge. I hated this “feature” in Windows, and I hate it more on my Linux machine.

    It’s possible there is some interaction with the virtual machine, as I’m using Ubuntu in vbox. I know I fought with the launcher autohide not appearing until someone pointed out it’s virtualbox stealing the mouse signal once it touches the edge.

  2. Dana Jacobsen: I was able to easily turn this off using gnome-tweaks (albeit on Ubuntu 20.04). Go to Windows, and turn off Edge Tiling. Easy-peasy.

    1. Is this actually the same thing? I consider “edge resistance” to be the “stickiness” perceived when you drag a window edge against another window edge or the edge of the screen. I don’t have a problem with that. On the other hand my post is about the behaviour where I drag a window so it hits the top of the screen and suddenly it is maximised to cover the whole screen. Which I never want, and find annoying. I can’t see any mention of that in your linked MR.

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