Re: Customization gnome3

[Chris Jones <cjns1989 gmail com>]

On Tue, Feb 12, 2013 at 04:05:32PM EST, Jason Heeris wrote:

> There are a couple of things I do to tweak fonts and other settings
> (in this order):
>
> 1. Use gnome-tweak-tool.

No effect on gnome-shell fonts (top panel, Overview, notifications..)

> 2. Use dconf-editor to change fonts. For example, window title font is
> under /org/gnome/desktop/wm/preferences/titlebar-font.

That's apparently/thankfully taken care of by gnome-tweak-tool as well. 

> 3. The Elegance-colors theme has an associated application
> ('elegance-colors') that allows you to change theme elements (colours,
> opacity, fonts, etc). Note that it does its own styling of the font
> you select, so only the base is relevant (eg. Ubuntu Italic might be
> changed to plain Ubuntu for the shell, Ubuntu Bold for the panel).

Even though it was somewhat broken, I used the elegance-colors GUI to
set the gnome-shell font when I was running 3.4.

I have two problems with it:

â I'm unable to install the user-themes extension now that I have
  upgraded to 3.6.. hence, I can't install the elegance-colors theme

â Since it's not part of the official gnome project, I wouldn't care to
  install such code on a production system

The good thing though, is that this clever little tool unambiguously
demonstrates that it would be easy enough to add gnome-shell font
customization to gnome-tweak-tool, since it appeared to work quite
reliably and effectively when I tried it with GS 3.4.Â

> I believe that in general, fonts for the shell and overview are set by
> the theme authors, so your options are (a) edit the themes you've been
> doing, or (b) find a theme like Elegance-colors that allows you to
> change the settings. Someone correct me if I'm wrong.

I think you're absolutely correct since you basically confirmed my
findings - keeping in mind that there is an added twist: it does not
look like there is any place where you can do _local system-wide_Â
customization. As a result, once you're done customizing your id's
session, you need to do the same for gdm (login screen, and presumably
the two lock screens) as well as other id's you might be using on the
system.

> Note that I'm using Gnome 3.6 on Ubuntu 12.10, and I suspect that #3
> might not work on 3.4, you might want to check that.

As mentioned earlier, it sort of worked with gnome-shell 3.4. 

With 3.6, it looks like there are a number of users who have complained
about the user-themes extension problems when you try to install via the
web browser plugin. Beats me why gnome-shell's theme-ing capability
would require installing an extension in the first place.. Aren't we
supposed to install themes by dragging & dropping some icon representing
a zip/tarball file these days...?

The other area of customization that absolutely needs some simple
centralized customization tool before gnome-shell can reasonably be
considered a viable DE alternative is keyboard shortcuts.. at least
where I'm concerned. 

I mentioned the so-called âemacsâ profile in my original post, which is
apparently not enforced in gnome-shell when specified via gnome-tweak
tool but then there are other aspects..

I won't seriously consider using Alt+Ctrl+Tab to navigate the various
components of the Overview (dash, top panel, notification tray..) for
instance.

But since GS looks more like beta stuff at this point, there's surely
a lot of room for improvement.. 

What worries me a bit though, is the extremely low activity on this
list... Heck, it's less than 5% of the volume on the e17 mailing list
for instance..

Anyway, cheers mate & thanks much for your comments.

CJ

 It's really a horrendous problem especially with font _sizes_. It took
  me about an hour to change the otherwise superb weather extension
  fonts sizes, reading the js's code to figure out what the gazillion
  different classes corresponded to, changing the px value in the css..
  restarting the gnome-shell.. changing it again because it was too big,
  now it's too small.. etc. gnome-shell and its extensions should
  probably not hard code such stuff and rather derive it from some
  global desktop settings that the user can change in one pass and have
  all his gnome-shell + extensions follow suit in real time. Not
  everybody is crazy about themes and wants to spend days customizing
  the look of their desktop.. 

 You obviously don't want to edit files under /usr/share and lose
  everything as soon as you upgrade.. I tried /usr/local/ but afaict
  gnome-shell does not look there.. same as with gnome2

-- 

Focus follow mouse users will burn in hell!!!