Question about CSS and documentation

["Shu Hung (Koala)" <koalay gmail com>]

Hello,

I'm new to gnome-shell and I love it. Thanks for your work.

I'm trying to tweak the UI a bit for my taste. For example, I'm trying to make my window title bar transparent. I'm a web developer and I'm familiar with CSS. I know gnome-shell has a _javascript_ binding and can be control through CSS. That made me think that it would be easy. Apparently, its not.


About CSS

Gnome-shell is not HTML after all. I couldn't trace the plain HTML code and find the correct element to style on. I'm not familiar with the C language, that stops me from studying the source code of gnome-shell to understand it completely. I'm sure many web developer would be as confuse as I do. If I don't know what elements are in the UI, I couldn't style them. That stops web developers from making more styles for Gnome Shell.

The main issue is: I found no documentation on CSS or UI elements. I don't know what is the right element for me to change. Nor do I know if there is any.


User-independent style / local style

Another problem is about user-independent style. In short: is it possible to style different users differently?

If I change /usr/share/gnome-shell/theme/gnome-shell.css, the changes go global. For extension, I can put the extension in ~/.local/share/gnome-shell/extensions. I thought I could put theme in ~/.local/share/gnome-shell/theme to do similar thing. But it doesn't seem to work. My style sheet ~/.local/share/gnome-shell/theme/gnome-shell.css is not effective. Either it is not read or it couldn't override settings in /usr/share/gnome-shell/theme/gnome-shell.css.


So my questions are:

1. How to change the window titles to transparent?
2. Is there any documentation on the UI elements or CSS for Gnome Shell? If not, will there be any?
3. Can we do local style for each single user?
   

Thanks.

Koala Yeung