Elegance Colors – A customizable chameleonic theme for Gnome Shell

Elegance Colors is a dark Gnome Shell theme made by me. The cool thing about Elegance Colors is that it is Chameleonic. If you ever used Ubuntu’s Unity, then you will see how it changes colors depending on the wallpaper color.

Apart from taking color from the wallpaper, Elegance Colors can also pick color from the GTK theme or use a user defined color.

Many other parts of the theme are also customizable. It supports the following customization options,

• Change font size
• Change panel opacity
• Change menu opacity
• Panel corner roundness
• Arrows in menu
• A light menu style
• Show app icon in panel

And the best thing is, you can change all the settings from a simple GUI.

Here are some screenshots :D

If you are using Ubuntu, you can install Elegance Colors from PPA (Note: Adding third party PPAs may break your system). The PPA is perfectly safe as there are no packages other than themes and it won’t update or conflict with your system packages :)

To install Elegance Colors in Ubuntu, run the following,

sudo add-apt-repository satyajit-happy/themes
sudo apt-get install gnome-shell-theme-elegance-colors

If you are using another distro, you have compile from source. First install the build-dependencies first (package names may vary depending on your distro),

glib2-devel gtk3-devel vala

Extract the archive, navigate to the directory and type the following command in a terminal as root,

make install

To make “Match wallpaper color” work, you will need to install ImageMagick

After installation, run “elegance-colors” from the terminal to start the process. the process will start in background, so you won’t see any outputs. It will also make a theme basing upon the template and default configuration.

To be able to change the theme, you need to install the User Theme Extension.

User Theme Extension

Then use Gnome Tweak tool to choose the theme, or run the following commands in Terminal,

gsettings set org.gnome.shell.extensions.user-theme name "elegance-colors"

When you change the configuration or change the wallpaper or GTK theme, it will usually take few seconds to apply the change. During this time, the theme is reloaded, and Gnome Shell may freeze if you do things really fast when reloading the theme.

Note that you will need the process to be running in the background to make the theme change automatically. Else you have to start the process manually.

And one last note, Elegance Colors won’t work if you are using a wallpaper slideshow in XML format.

Elegance Colors