Alt+Tab To Switch Windows Only On Current Workspace In GNOME Shell

Clean and fast method to force GNOME Shell to switch between active apps only on the current workspace when pressing the shortcut Alt+Tab.

By default Gnome 3 “Alt+Tab” switches windows on all workspaces. If you prefer to have many workspaces with little amount of windows on each of them this behavior does not work well. Maybe you want to switch windows on the active workspace only.

When googling the Alt Tab Workspace extension is the top result. The code on GitHub turns out that this following command does the trick:

gsettings set org.gnome.shell.app-switcher current-workspace-only true

So, no extension needed.

With the GUI

Another very fast and easy solution, without any installations/extensions:

1. Install dconf-editor (already installed on current Debian/Ubuntu distributions):

sudo apt-get install dconf-editor

2. Open dconf-editor (from the Dash or a Terminal)

3. Navigate to: org -> gnome -> shell -> app-switcher

4. Set current-workspace-only to true

And you’re done.