Add categories to gnome shell (within activities view)

There are some distributions that bring this feature by default. Is it an extension? A shell specific version? Take a look at this screenshot:

This is a feature that comes only with older versions of GNOME. The screenshot you are looking at is of an older version of GNOME Shell. In versions of GNOME prior to 3.8, there was a category selector on the right side as your screenshot shows. In GNOME 3.8, the category filter was removed and applications can now be launched using either a "Frequent" or "All" filter.

Compare the following two screenshots of the GNOME Activities Overview from two successive releases of GNOME.

GNOME 3.6 Activities Overview

This screenshot from the GNOME 3.6 Activities Overview Release Notes shows the application categories on the right side.

GNOME 3.8 Activities Overview

This screenshot from the GNOME 3.8 Release Notes shows the lack of categories and the "Frequent" and "All" filters at the bottom of the screen instead.

This change in the Activities Overview was an intentional design change. More can be read about this design change in the "Stage 2" section of this application picker design document on the GNOME wiki.

This is an old answer but it helped me today so I thought I'd share it. This blog post goes into some detail but the practical upshot is that you can add categories to org.gnome.shell => app-folder-categories using dconf-editor to tell the dash to group up your items.

Here's the dconf location:

The recommended value of

['Utilities', 'Games', 'Sundry', 'Office', 'Network', 'Internet', 'Graphics', 'Multimedia', 'System', 'Development', 'Accessories', 'System Settings', 'wine-wine', 'Crossover', 'Crossover Games', 'Science', 'Education', 'Universal Access', 'chrome-apps', 'Other']

worked well for me on gnome-shell 3.10.4-0ubuntu5.2.