Collector is a very interesting and appealing little application that acts as a sort of temperary visual clipboard on which you can add files via drag and drop gestures. In short, it’s heavily inspired by Dropover for macOS, but without all the sparkles and glitter usually associated with Mac apps.
If you ask me, the biggest drawback of this app (as it currently stands) is the fact that there’s no option to make its GUI stay on top of other windows, which, in certain conditions, can prove a bit of a hindrance.
Thankfully, there is a way to make Collector’s GUI stay on top of other windows and it comes in the form of a tiny GNOME Shell extension. It’s called Collector – complementary extension, and when it is enabled, it allows the Collector window to stay on top of other windows at all times.
This is particularly good in those situations where you can’t actually spare some extra screen space for the app’s GUI (even though, granted, it’s quite compact), and you’re forced to keep Collector on top of other apps. In short, this extension eliminates the need to ALT+TAB between Collector and the apps you’re working with/on.
What I find most interesting about this extension is the fact that it’s actually a fork of the gnome-shell-extension-firefox-pip, an extension that designed to make Firefox’s Picture-in-Picture window stay always on top.
I’ll be the first to say that, indeed, it’s not an ideal solution for a problem that shouldn’t have been there in the first place (not trying to be mean).
The main issue with this “setup” is that this GNOME Shell extension only works on GNOME 45, and let’s face it, not everyone has upgraded to GNOME 45 (mainly because Ubuntu 24.04 LTS is two months away from its release date at the time of this writing).
Well, if your work involves moving around files from one place to another, then Collector is a must-have. Hence, if you’re struggling with screen space, and you don’t want to context switch from Collector to other windows a million times in a day, then, yes, Collector – complementary extension is worth using. Oh, one more thing – as usual, the easiest way to install the extension is with the help of the wonderful Extension Manager app.
