satya | November 8, 2012

Make your own Gnome Shell theme with Elegance Colors

This post was made with another stylesheet and it might be messed up!

I posted about Elegance Colors before. It is a chameleon theme for Gnome Shell which can change colors according to the current GTK theme, current wallpaper (uses imagemagick to get color) or a user defined color.

Today I have updated it with some new features (and bug fixes too). The most notable feature is that it allows to export your customized theme. So you can basically create a new Gnome Shell theme! You can theoretically create an unlimited number of themes with different customization settings. Though it is not the same as making your own Gnome Shell theme by hand, it is still an easy way to make themes with customized colors, gradients, transparency etc. Don’t expect your theme to be unique though!

To export your customized theme, first make any changes and apply them. Then choose “Export theme” from the GMenu.

The current version 0.3~release2 is compatible with Gnome Shell 3.6 and has the following changes since our last post,

  • Show the icon only in Gnome
  • Minor changes to the GUI
  • Many enhancements to the script
  • Changes are now instantly applied
  • Options to set gradient size, transition duration and box shadow
  • Ability to export the customized theme

If you use Ubuntu, you can install Elegance Colors from my themes PPA using the following commands,

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

Others will need to compile from source. Sorry :(

Elegance Colors requires the User Themes extension to work. If you have installed the User Themes extension from the extensions.gnome.org website, make sure to run the following command as root,

elegance-colors fix

Then just run the command,

elegance-colors

Now choose the theme from Gnome Tweak Tool or run,

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

Which features would you like to see in Elegance Colors? What is your favorite configuration? Drop in the comments below!

Elegance Colors on deviantArt

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  • bladyshaman

    omg… how I love this “featureless” DE :D :* Thanks guys! Great work!

  • Swapnil Chitnis

    What GTK theme is being used in that screenshot?

    • http://funsurf-blog.blogspot.com/ Satyajit Sahoo
    • Vincent O’Neil

      It’s great isn’t it? It’s my favourite theme. Thanks to some inspiration from reading some of Satyajit’s articles on this blog I’ve made some modifications to the Elementary GTK3 theme and released it on deviantart but it is nowhere near as good as Evolve. When I get some time I’d like to create my own GTK3 theme from scratch.

  • Mathias Rudolf

    Features, i think would be cool for the tweak gui:

    - Size of the icons in app-overview
    - Possibility to set the gradient also for Dash and Workspaces Panel
    - Fonts

    But I know, then this tool is getting to be more and more an overall theme tweaking tool. But … why not?

    • http://funsurf-blog.blogspot.com/ Satyajit Sahoo

      Thanks for the suggestions. Will try to implement them.

    • http://funsurf-blog.blogspot.com/ Satyajit Sahoo

      Your last two suggestions have been implemented, though still in testing stage and not released yet. You can test it https://github.com/satya164/elegance-colors :D

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