Sunday, December 11, 2011

Gnome Tweak Tool

GNOME 3 or as i like to call it 'G3' is the newest release of the Gnome desktop. Many Linux users and distributions are starting to adopt G3 as their default desktop environment because of its look and feel, user-friendliness and performance. But when it comes to customizing, there aren't many options available by default in G3.  If you want to do more serious customization on your G3 desktop then you need the Gnome tweak tool.
The Gnome tweak tool is an open source tool developed to customize your G3 beyond normal settings. With this great tool you can make advanced adjustments to various G3 settings including fonts used in the user interface, user interface themes, changes in window management behavior and much more.
Interested? then let's proceed to install Gnome tweak tool in Ubuntu using G3. 
Gnome tweak tool is on the Ubuntu repositories, meaning that installing is as simple as opening software center and typing 'gnome tweak tool' on the search box, clicking install and watch the progress bar :-)
Once you're through with the install, you can start tweaking the settings of G3. Gnome tweak tool has a very simple and intuitive interface, on the left panel you have six different categories (Desktop, Fonts, Shell, Shell Extensions, Theme and Windows) that can be 'tweaked' using the corresponding options on the right panel.

Let's click on the 'Desktop' category on the left panel, on the right panel you can choose from the different tweaking options for the desktop, an image says more than a thousand words so take a look at the following screenshots.

gnome_tweak_tool_desktop

Now click Fonts, here you can configure the Text scaling factor, Default font, Document font, Monospace font, Window title font, Hinting and Antialising.

gnome_tweak_tool_fonts

Under Shell category, you can configure date, time, calendar and arrangements of buttons on the titlebar.

gnome_tweak_tool_shell

The theme category takes care of the setting for menus and buttons as well as themes for cursor, key binding, icons, Gtk+, shell and window.

gnome_tweak_tool_theme

The Windows category, here you can configure the settings for  various click actions on the title bar of windows and the window focus mode as well.

gnome_tweak_tool_windows


















Happy customizing!!!!