Enhance Gnome
It’s time to boldly go where no gnome has gone before.
G nome has decisively won the battle of the GTK desktops with the ousting of Unity. The debut of the new fangled GTK desktop ruffled quite a few feathers but those days of unrest are long behind us. One of the common criticisms of the new Gnome desktop was the lack of customisation options. While it isn’t as tweakable as KDE, Gnome users these days have a lot more options to play around with.
One of the most powerful features of the Gnome desktop is the Activities Overview with its unified search to match any user input with relevant apps and settings as well as files and folders. You can customise the behaviour of the search by heading to System Settings>Search under the Personal section. To change the locations that it monitors, click the gears icon. This pops up a window where you can customise the list of search locations by disabling any of the existing ones and adding new ones.
The Activities Overview includes a launcher-like Favourites bar that you can customise by pinning frequently used programs to it. At the top is a search box that will match strings to programs and documents on the local computer as well as online services. When personalising Gnome, your first port of call should be to set up the Gnome Online Accounts to share data from a variety of online services into the offline desktop versions. It supports a variety of popular services, including Google, Nextcloud, Flickr, Facebook and more. Do my bidding Gnome ships with a System Settings tool, which although isn’t as diverse as some of its peers, still offers several useful options. An often overlooked feature of the desktop is its ability to enable remote access and file sharing with a single click. Head to System Settings> Sharing and enable the setting using the toggle button at the top. Then click the File Sharing option, which when enabled shares the contents of the Public folder inside your home directory via the WebDAV protocol. You also have the option of locking access with a password. Similarly, the Media Sharing option will share the contents of the Music, Videos and Pictures folders. The third option called Remote Logging will enable SSH access to the desktop.
Another personalisation task that can enhance productivity is the arrangement of installed programs under custom groups. To do this, launch Gnome
Software, switch to the Installed tab and click the checkmark button which puts a checkbox in front of the applications. Then select the applications you wish to group and click the Add to Folder button. Here you can either click the + button to create a new folder or select an existing one. The applications will now be categorised under this folder in the Activities Overview. Performance boost One tweak that will improve the performance of the desktop is hidden under the GnomeDisks tool. Fire it up and head to Settings>Drive Settings, switch to the Write Cache tab and enable the setting. Your hard disk will now cache data and only write it to the disk at fixed intervals. Make sure you enable this setting on a laptop only, or else you might lose data if it hasn’t been written to the disk before a power failure-induced shutdown.
To dress up Gnome, go to www.gnome-look.org and browse the Gnome Shell themes, GTK3 application themes and more. When you find a theme you like, switch over to the Files section from where you can manually download the theme as a compressed file and extract it under the ~/.themes folder. Alternatively, use the OCS-Install option to automate this process if your Linux installation is equipped to handle OCS URLs ( https://github.com/opendesktop/ocs-url/wiki/Howto-install). When the theme has been extracted, you can switch to it from under the Appearance section of the GnomeTweaks app (see box, right). Gnome more please! There are some aspects of the desktop that are eyesores to many, such as the lack of minimise buttons and no icons on the desktops. When you right-click the
desktop you don’t get the option to create folders or shortcuts, but entries to change the background and launch the Settings window.
The easiest way to add functionality to Gnome 3 is via shell extensions. Best of all, you can install these from the Gnome Extensions website itself ( http://
extensions.gnome.org) in just a few clicks. There are dozens of extensions on the website. Some of the useful ones are Dash to Panel, which replaces the top bar and the dash with a single panel at the bottom of the screen. There’s also Clipboard Indicator that implements simple clipboard management to the desktop and ShellTile to group windows in a variety of ways. Some extension also have configurable parameters that you can tweak after enabling the extensions. Just switch to the Installed Extensions tab on the website and click the wrench icon adjacent to the extension that you want to tweak. Sherlock Gnome- ing In the background, the Gnome desktop uses the dconf configuration database to store system and application settings. You can manipulate it graphically with the
dconf-editor tool or with the command-line gsettings tool. These utilities come in handy particularly for those settings that aren’t exposed either via the systems settings or tweak tool. So, for instance, you can customise a lot of keyboard shortcuts from under System Settings>Devices> Keyboard section. But some shortcuts, such as Alt+` to cycle through open windows, can’t be influenced from the graphical utility. This key combination is also used for a similar purpose in the emacs editor. To use it in
emacs you can change the keys for switching windows in Gnome via the Dconf editor. Fire up the editor and navigate to /org/gnome/desktop/wm/keybindings/ switch-group. Then turn off the Use default value toggle and enter the new key combination in the Custom value field. If you find navigating the dconf editor cumbersome, you can influence the keys from the CLI. For instance, gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.lockdown disablelock-screen true will disable the lock screen. Similarly, if you want to disable the default 60-second delay when logging out, type gsettings set org.gnome. SessionManager logout-prompt false . By default, Gnome 3 disables emulating the middle mouse button. But you can enable it with gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.peripherals.mouse middlebutton-enabled true . One of the interesting but hidden features in Gnome is that the desktop has a built-in screencast recorder that starts recording when you press Ctrl+Alt+Shift+R. On most Gnome distros, the feature will record videos for 30 seconds. To change this behaviour and record as long as the partition doesn’t run out of free space you’ll need to type gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon. plugins.media-keys max-screencast-length 0 . The 0 here signifies unlimited duration. You now have to use the same key combination to start and stop the recording. By default, the screencasts are saved under the Videos directory. Again, you can use gsettings to switch to a different directory. The command gsettings set org.gnome.gnome-screenshot auto-save-directory file:///home/bodhi/recordings will save the screencasts to the /home/bodhi/recordings folder.
The gsettings utility is fairly extensive and well documented. One of its popular uses is to help customise a fresh installation. Simply add all your
gsettings tweaks inside a script and then execute it on a fresh Gnome install.