Theming Gnome Shell:Intro

For the last several months, I’ve been running gnome-shell full time. For those of you who don’t know what this is, it is version 3 of Gnome, one of the many available Linux graphical user interfaces (see here for more info). We are currently on something like 2.3 for the stable release of Gnome I believe.

With this new major release of Gnome, its developers significantly changed the interface in an attempt to simplify window and virtual desktop management, bringing Linux just one step closer to being more "user friendly".

Along with all of this change came a new method for theming and tweaking the look and feel of things. In the past, Gnome used multiple configuration files that were cumbersome to edit. In this new release, Gnome has switched over to using…​you guessed it…​ CSS! How exciting.

Continuing on, for those of you who don’t know what CSS is, it’s basically a "programming language" (I know I know, it’s not technically a programming language)  used primarily to style websites. In most cases this takes the form of setting the background image or color, font size, family and color, and various other style-related things on the interwebz. This is really great because standards are already in place for CSS making Gnome-shell much easier to theme and learn to theme.

If anyone reading this blog doesn’t personally know me (which is quite likely since Google knows more people than I do), I’m basically addicted to theming my computer. If you ask my girlfriend, while we were in college together she would be doing homework and I would theme my computer for hours on end when I SHOULD have been doing my homework. When Gnome-shell came out, I got addicted pretty quickly.

This post is a precursor to my theme postings. I’ve made so many out of boredom (and that I just can’t seem to find quite the right look) that I feel kind of bad not posting them for all to use. I will also write a few posts regarding how to theme Gnome-shell as well. But first, some themes!!!

Category:Linux Category:Gnome