Gnome3 Customise Shell Theme

Intro

I recently re-installed Ubuntu 1804 on my laptop and I though I would give the PopOS desktop theme from system76 a try. The verdict? It's very very nice. Next time I do a re-install or get a new laptop I think I will use PopOS which is based in Ubuntu anyway. Side note: If a System76 distribution channel opens up here in Australia I will probably go for a System76 system for my next laptop.

There where a couple of things that bugged me that I needed to change in the gnome shell profile as the settings where not available in Gnome tweak tools. Those things where:

• Change the font on the top bar and drop downs menus
• Change the font colour of the Gnome search box

Create Custom Theme

The first thing to do was create a custom theme as I didnt want to mess around with the default them. I am using the Pop-dark theme.

cp -r /usr/share/themes/Pop-dark/ ~/.themes/Pop-dark-bradmin
sudo chown -R bradmin:bradmin ~/.themes/Pop-dark-bradmin

Then it was just a matter of restarting tweak tools and selecting the Pop-dark-bradmin theme.

Change Top Bar Font

The default PopOS font is Fira Sans. It a pretty nice font, but too blocky looking for my liking. I actually really like the Ubuntu fonts, they look smooth and render really nicely on high res screens.

First I had to locate where the font was set.

egrep -r "Fira Sans" ~/.themes/Pop-dark-bradmin/

# output
/home/bradmin/.themes/Pop-dark-bradmin/gnome-shell/pop.css  font-family: Fira Sans, Cantarell, Sans-Serif;
/home/bradmin/.themes/Pop-dark-bradmin/gnome-shell/gnome-shell.css  font-family: Fira Sans, Cantarell, Sans-Serif;

Alright, so it's set in the pop.css and gnome-shell.css files. So I added Ubuntu to the start of the font-family in the stage section and that solved that one.

/* ~/.themes/Pop-dark-bradmin/gnome-shell/{pop,gnome-shell}.css */

stage {
  font-family: Ubuntu, Fira Sans, Cantarell, Sans-Serif;
  font-size: 10.5pt;
  font-weight: 400;
  color: #FFFFFF;
}

Change Search Box Font Colour

This was a bit of a tricky one. The default font colour was really dark and you could barely see the text.

I found this github issue referencing the problem I was facing and it was just a matter of finding the files to change the font colour.

Turns out it is the same files as above pop.css and gnome-shell.css

I commented out the color: #49423e; lines in the .search-entry and .search-entry:focus sections in both files and that was the fix for that issue.

/* ~/.themes/Pop-dark-bradmin/gnome-shell/{pop,gnome-shell}.css */

.search-entry {
  width: 20em;
  padding: 8px 12px;
  border-radius: 0;
  color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.85);
  /* color: #49423e; */
  background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.01);
  border-color: transparent;
  border-radius: 4px 4px 0 0;
  box-shadow: inset 0 -2px rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.25);
  background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.01);
}

.search-entry:focus {
  /* color: #49423e; */
  color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.85);
  background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.01);
  border-color: transparent;
  border-radius: 4px 4px 0 0;
  box-shadow: inset 0 -2px #faa41a;
  background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.01);
}

Reloading Gnome Settings

I also found out the below methods of forcing a reload of the gnome user shell config without having to logout/in again from this post.

gdbus call --session --dest org.gnome.Shell --object-path /org/gnome/Shell --method org.gnome.Shell.Eval 'Main.loadTheme();'
gsettings set org.gnome.shell.extensions.user-theme name <name-of-theme>