Making changes in the shell theme of Gnome

[Oli]

Hello,
I want to make some changes in the shell theme. I found out that there is a gnome-shell.css file in the theme folder. Can I make some changes here? Do I have to compile it or how do I make it work?

The changes I want to make are some size changes in the grid of the Appicons in the App launcher.
Some googling showed me that there is a css class named icon-grid. I changed the size of it in the css file but nothing happened. Even after a restart. What am I doing wrong?

[bogdancovaciu]

Hello,

Don’t hold your breath … especially now that Gnome 42 is rolling also on stable soon.
I wrote something about GDM theme some time ago

[How To] User level of modifying GDM theme

Difficulty: ★★☆☆☆ Many users find themselves in the situation that their custom theme is not matching satisfactory, for their aesthetics, the GDM theme, or simply what to change the accent colors of the default GDM theme installed. Since GDM is using *.gresource file, a direct edit to it is not possible and needs to be extracted first, and then recompiled. Here is how you can do that: Use this shell script to extract the original GDM theme. #!/bin/sh gst=/usr/share/gnome-shell/gnome-shell-t…

Might help to understand that just editing the css is not enough.

[Oli]

Do you mean that in Gnome 42 the theme works on a different way?

[bogdancovaciu]

Seems to be some changes, didn’t dig much. The principle should be the same, but apparently there are other changes for some definitions as is using libadwaita now.

[Oli]

I tried it, but I can’t generate the *.gresource file. There is no gnome-shell-theme.gresource.xml file.

The theme I use is Matcha-aliz. Do I have to use a different theme?

[bogdancovaciu]

@Oli

Matcha-aliz

You can use that but see the source of it. The files are there Matcha-gtk-theme/src/gnome-shell at master · vinceliuice/Matcha-gtk-theme · GitHub
as it has the gdm-theme.gresource.xml and gnome-shell-theme.gresource.xml and you do not have to extract it … You can even fork it and make it your own with your own touch-ups.

[Oli]

How do I know that I don’t have to extract it?

[bogdancovaciu]

Because you have the source of it in the link … you do not use the precompiled one that you install via AUR. Is much easier to identify everything via the sass/scss files, you edit those and then compile it as per instructions.

[Oli]

Ah now I see some changes when I reboot. That’s very good. Thank you.
Do you know a bit about the gnome-shell.css? or know a good tutorial about what each css class does?

I found the icon-grid but I want to make some other changes.