Switching Themes in Gnome Shell

by Andre Engelbrecht

development gnome shell linux python

Update: I originally wrote this app to help changing themes, when there was no other simple way to do this. There are however much better solutions being built atm.

As many of you may know, Gnome3 is due for release later this year, and with it's release, we will see Gnome-Shell become the new window manager for many Linux distributions based on Gnome. I have played around with Gnome-Shell and I have to say that I really like how it's making everyday tasks something that feels natural and simple. I really look forward to the end result.

I did however have one initial complaint about Gnome-Shell, and that was that it's not easy to change themes, yet. What I do like, is that the gnome developers decided to use Javascript and CSS to manage themes and features for the new manager, which in theory will allow for much easier customization by people that may not have extensive programming/coding knowledge.

I found this thread on ubuntuforums.org, where a group of people are combining efforts to make nice themes for gnome-shell, and this has really inspired me to make the whole process a lot simpler. At the moment however, changing the theme, is a hassle, because you have to manually overwrite the current theme files in the gnome-shell folder and because it's still in development, it resets back to the default every time there is a gnome-shell update. 

GSThemer - Theme management for Gnome-Shell

The gnome developers will no-doubt eventually develop applications to update the gnome-shell themes, but at the time of writing this blog I have not seen anything for that yet.

I decided to write a small python application to manage the installation and switching of gnome-shell themes a lot simpler. At the moment this software is to be considered BETA and I cannot guarantee that it will work flawlessly. I should also add that I don't currently have gnome-shell installed (laptop is in for repairs), and therefore have not fully tested the app, but I have tested it with “dummy” gnome-shell folders, and it should work in theory. Use it at your own risk.

The app is hosted on Github: http://github.com/andrewebdev/gsthemer

Issues, bugs or feature requests: http://github.com/andrewebdev/gsthemer/issues

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