Gnome Shell Extensions and Tweaks

A few weeks ago I wrote a rather enthusiastic review about Mint 12 “Lisa”, and I’m still using it as my daily OS. I really like my current Gnome Shell setup and I never liked Gnome 2, so I’m not interested in the various attempts to recreate its XP like user experience (Mate, Cinnamon, …). In fact I think forking Gnome (no matter if old or new code) is a pointless waste of time, when you could just use XFCE instead. But back to the subject at hand which is how to get more out of Gnome 3.

The killer feature of Gnome Shell is the extension concept, which allows you to customize and extend your desktop as easily as your browser. Here’s a small selection of the extensions I use, for more browse extensions.gnome.org or use my Google Custom Search (there are so many cool extensions meanwhile, that finding a special one can become difficult):

• Alternative Status Menu: Seperate entries for suspend / hibernate in status menu
• Coverflow Alt-Tab: Nice Compiz- style Alt-Tab animation
• Disable Window Animations: Disables window effects
• Evil Status Icon Forever: Adds / removes tray icons, moves clock to the right
• Native window placement: More efficient screen usage in overwiew
• Pulse Audio Shortcuts: Adds shortcuts to PulseAudio mixer and preferences
• Status-Only-Icon: Hide user name and show only an icon for the status menu
• Window List: Show a task list in top panel instead of activity name (if you want Icons only, check Window Icon List instead)

Most extensions work by just installing them (using the switch to the left of the entry on extensions.gnome.org), if  you see no change, restart Gnome Shell (Alt+F2, r). The “Evil Status Icon” extension needs to be customized by modifying ~/.local/share/gnome-shell/extensions/EvilStatusIconForever@bone.twbbs.org.tw/extension.js (e.g. to show Gajim, add “gajim.py” to the application list, to hide the bluetooth icon uncomment the related line in the “built-in” list). If you use Mint you already have some of these extensions (and a couple of others) installed. You can use Gnome Tweak Tool (“Advanced Settings”) to enable or disable them (I disabled all Mint extensions except mgse-userthemes).

There are a lot of other tweaks in the Tips & Tricks thread of the Mint forums, only downside is you have to use browser search (Ctrl+F) to find it them, unfortunately it is not possible to link a “trick” directly. Here’s again my personal selection:

• 2g – “Less spacing between notification area icons”  allows you to compress the notification are on the top panel to make more room for the task list
• 2i – “Change size of overview grid icons” helps to get more application icons on my 12″ netbook screen

For both tips, make sure to adapt the gedit path to the theme you actually use (e.g. replace “Mint-Z” by “Mint-Z-Dark”). If the theme was installed from a repository, you should also lock the package in Synaptic (or your package manager of choice), to avoid your changes being overwritten when the theme gets updated.

Filed under: linux, mint, other