The Gnome Shell themes thread... ...

[techno-mole]

Whot is the part of code for edit the color of "activies menu"?

do you mean the activities button (top left of the screen) there is a section that controls the look of the button itself and then there is a section that controls the look of the overview (the thing that opens up when clicking on activities or mousing over the corner)

the following is for the panel buttons

/*controls the colour of the panel buttons, eg - the activites button on the left, and the user menu on the right*/
.panel-button:active, .panel-button:checked, .panel-button:pressed 
{
   
    background-gradient-direction: vertical;
    background-gradient-start: rgba(255,128,0,1.0);
    background-gradient-end: rgba(42,27,10,1.0);
}

the next section is for the overview.

/* Overview */
/* this section controls the main colouring of the overview mode*/
.overview {
    
    background-gradient-direction: vertical;
    background-gradient-start: rgba(42,27,10,1.0);
    background-gradient-end: rgba(255,128,0,0.7);
}

hope this helps.

[augias]

• 1 - the ability to change the zoom in/out effect when activating the hot corner. eg - to a fade in/out effect.
• 2 - the ability to edit themes from within gnome shell, eg - an embedded editor,or through gconf etc etc
• 3 - the ability to change where the hot corner is, eg - moving it from the top left to elsewhere so as not to interfere with window bar buttons that are aligned to the left (as is the case with lucid)
• 4 - the ability to change the shape of the desktop previews in mosaic mode, eg - rounding of the corners, or making the previews circles etc
• 5 - the ability to use (easily) images for the backgrounds of the various gnome shell aspects. eg - using a different image for the overview and app menus etc.

Don't wanna rain on your parade but I'm sure that these topics are not on the developer's radar (nor should they be). It's fun to personalize but its still too early for fun superficial things to be discussed when the general layout that will support these skin-deep changes are constantly changing.

I can answer most of your doubts about the items on your list with one word: Extensions.

All of those things you're wondering about are extensible. I'm using an alt+tab extension that behaves differently from the official g-s one, for example. (no miniature window previews. they were a little unreliable for my use) That was done by a guy who's just interested in getting things to work his way and it just so happens it works for me too. Not G-S's responsibility imo.

So if you really wanna see those changes, you're gonna have to start getting independent hackers interested in studying the extensions api while the g-s devs get busy fine tuning everything thats right/wrong/mocked-up in gnome-shell

[techno-mole]

Granted some of those "features" may well come under extensions, however they are still things that users want, and I thought it best to list them in one place.

A lot of what people have mentioned are on the side of customization, and there are other things which would be better dealt with before say the ability to edit the look of the shell using gconf or some other method, however the ability to move where the corner activation is, in my opinion doesnt really come under extensions or customization, I have seen comments by people wanting to know if it can be moved elsewhere because of the way they use their windows, eg - window bar buttons aligned to the left, one comment I saw mentioned that every time the user went to close/minimize/maximize he activated the corner, which was affecting his usability of the shell, and therefore something that needs looking at, in my book anyway.

Something else, from my point of view is that no matter how I start the shell I have to hit alt+f2 and type restart to get the cursor to show up on the panel and in the overview mode, again a thing that affects the usability of the shell, and again from my point of view having some kind of editor to change the look is just me being lazy, but people will want to change the way it looks, in an easy way, some people find the default look hard to deal with.

From my point of view a lot of what people have mentioned is irrelevant to me personally, I dont use alt+tab or most of the other features, I just use the mosaic view and thats about it.

I think that although some of these things are small and perhaps not that important to the main development, but users seem to want them, and if the features people want arent there, then it wont get used.

So whilst it may seem pointless to list them, at least people will be aware of how users feel about it, and maybe some one will decide to write a load of extensions for it, or maybe some of the things will get implemented into the shell.

We shall see, I see no reason not to list the things people want, regardless of how small they might be.

[augias]

I have seen comments by people wanting to know if it can be moved elsewhere because of the way they use their windows, eg - window bar buttons aligned to the left, one comment I saw mentioned that every time the user went to close/minimize/maximize he activated the corner, which was affecting his usability of the shell, and therefore something that needs looking at, in my book anyway.

This feature reminds me of an extension I know about that disables the hotspot, so you don't accidentally enter overview, just clicking "activities" or your super key. This is a good example of an extension that solves that problem (maybe not ideally for some though). However i agree this should definitely become a preference to turn on and off in G-S itself. I think in the end what's going to happen is when the project is more or less done, a shell-preferences menu will have to be added to system preferences. This is probably inevitable.

BTW tech-mole, I'm updating the theme I uploaded here to match the new css configurations that are getting pushed in the master branch. I thnk it's a good idea you do that too so anyone curious about the themes doesnt get any unexpected results.

PS: What about making the first post include an updated gallery of user's submissions?

[techno-mole]

This feature reminds me of an extension I know about that disables the hotspot, so you don't accidentally enter overview, just clicking "activities" or your super key. This is a good example of an extension that solves that problem (maybe not ideally for some though)

whilst this solves the problem of accidentally activating the hot spot, turning it off may not be want some want, so i agree that having the option to switch it off, or align it to the top right or bottom left etc etc is a better approach, simply disabling it seems a touch drastic to my mind.

However i agree this should definitely become a preference to turn on and off in G-S itself. I think in the end what's going to happen is when the project is more or less done, a shell-preferences menu will have to be added to system preferences. This is probably inevitable.

and required to my mind, a menu in the system preferences that allows the user to enable/disable features and adjust aspects of the shells behavior is a good idea, people may want to bind keys to various functions, eg - activate the overview by using the meta key/super key for example.
an easy way to do this makes it more usable, and would be a feature to be requested, or at least discussed, to see if its viable.

if you put yourself in the shoes of a new user to ubuntu (or distro running gnome) are they going to be able to use gnome shell ? its probably going to be fairly difficult for the new user to adjust their thinking from a windows mind set to an ubuntu/or other distro way of thinking, complicated configurations will be something they may want to mess with in time, but not right away, so a settings menu for gnome shell will be helpful, especially if it becomes the default setup,which i still think is a bad idea, users need to be able to choose, imposing things like this on a user seems familiar for some reason

[pabc]

I've installed smoke and everything works except what I think is the overview background. It stays black despite the css of the section being;

.overview {

background-gradient-direction: vertical;
background-gradient-start: rgba(42,27,10,1.0);
background-gradient-end: rgba(255,128,0,0.7);
}

i've copied the contents of the archive to /usr/sharegnome-shell after backing up the existing theme folder.

i'm on gnome-shell 2.28.1 / 10.04 b1.

Sadly I only tried this theme swap after switching to 10.04 so don't know if that's the issue I'm seeing.

Any suggestions?

[augias]

I've installed smoke and everything works except what I think is the overview background.
i've copied the contents of the archive to /usr/sharegnome-shell after backing up the existing theme folder.

[...]

Any suggestions?

Really important for us to know where you installed it from, as gnome shell from ubuntu's repos / Rico Tzschichholz's ppa / jhbuild from git.gnome.org are all at different intervals of up-to-date.

I can rule our jhbuild because your install directory is in /usr/ and jhbuild installs in /home/username/

In any case, on the newest version, .overview is the correct class on the stylesheet. Can't see why it wont change. However a few months back, I also could not alter the area behind the workspaces, so I assume your version of gnome-shell is the older ubuntu-repository package. If so, i recommend getting the ricotz ppa or installing from source.

Good luck.

[pabc]

I just did a "update-manager -d" to get 10.04B1 and noticed gnome-shell had been upgraded during the process so I guess I got it from the ubuntu repos.

[agrh]

Just thought I'd contribute my notes on gnome-shell.css. I've re-organized a bit so it makes more sense to me and put lots of comments in, but it's just not something I'm going to finish. Nevertheless, here it is.

[techno-mole]

I just did a "update-manager -d" to get 10.04B1 and noticed gnome-shell had been upgraded during the process so I guess I got it from the ubuntu repos.

you should either build from source, or use the testing ppa.

i will have a look at the css, im using lucid beta 1, but im using the ppa so i shall change the default look and see what happens.

****** Update ******

just tested the smoke css on lucid beta 1 using the testing ppa, all aspects of it work, apart from the search filed and the ability to add another workspace by dragging the windows of applications to the right in overview, so i dont know why the smoke css isnt working.
my advice would be to add this - ppa:ricotz/testing to your sources list, go to --> system --> software sources and add it from there, reload and then update, it should be version 2.29 of gnome shell, and the css should work.

however the most up to date version of the gnome shell css i have is attached to the first post of this thread - here

there is also this post which also has an up to date css, with a different layout to mine, so people may find it easier to understand than mine.

its the last attachment named "latest" you can edit the colouring from there, i will try and update the css for all the schemes today, or over the weekend, but please bare with me, my son is currently in the hospital (should be out today) after having an operation on both his feet, he will be in casts for 3 weeks.

i will do my best to get round to it.

cheers