Month: November 2021

Customizing Cinnamon window buttons

I decided to daily-drive Cinnamon for a while. It’s been good to me so far, but I was missing one option that I was used to from other environments.

Apparently, Cinnamon used to have options for customizing window buttons in the settings, but it was removed in Linux Mint 19.3 (theoretically for the reason of simplifying the options). So we can change whether the buttons are on the left or right side, but we can’t add or remove individual buttons.

I personally like to remove the maximize button. I’ll have to install dconf-editor to do it. Should I keep explaining how to install stuff? Is anyone reading these?

Arch-based:

pacman -S dconf-editor

If you’re using Mint (or another Debian-based distro):

sudo apt install dconf-editor

Once installed and launched, the path in dconf-editor is:
org / cinnamon / desktop / wm / preferences / button-layout

Click on that and go down to the bottom. Untoggle “Use default value” and set the “Custom value.” Think of the colon as the title in the center. In my case, the text to use was “:minimize,close” because screw the menu button as well.

Thanks to this thread in the Mint forums.

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Fixing Qt apps in Xfce

In environments besides KDE, Qt apps stick out like a sore thumb as they don’t respect your theme. I spent some time trying to fix this with Kvantum but it didn’t seem to work. After what I declared to be a long enough time putting up with it, today I finally found this page that explains qt5ct is the solution.

To summarize, first get Kvantum and qt5ct. For Arch-based distros like mine:

sudo pacman -S kvantum-qt5 qt5ct

Then you can apply a theme in Kvantum Manager. It’s worth noting that you can likely download a theme that matches what you’re using for GTK if there isn’t one built-in.

It’s also worth noting that this doesn’t work yet. Open up qt5ct (itself a Qt app; note the style of the window) and change the “Style” dropdown to “kvantum” and hit “Apply.” Wait a moment and you’ll see the qt5ct window change before your very eyes! Now you can open Qt apps without blinding yourself.

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New tab background in Firefox

I found a Reddit post explaining how to set this up, but it was missing a crucial step, so here we go. This should work on any OS.

First, get into your profile directory. If you don’t know where it lives, go to about:profiles in FF and hit the button that takes you to the root folder.

In there, create a “chrome” folder, and in there, put your image, as well as a userContent.css file. That CSS file should contain the following:

@-moz-document url-prefix(about:home), url-prefix(about:newtab) { .click-target-container *, .top-sites-list * { color: #fff !important ; text-shadow: 2px 2px 2px #000 !important ; }

body { background: url(wallpaper.jpg) !important ; background-size: cover !important ; } }

(Obviously change wallpaper.jpg to your image’s filename.)

Now, before this will work, we need to enable custom CSS. Go to about:config and search for toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets. Set that to “true” and restart FF.

That’s it, new tabs should have a background now.

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Customizing GNOME

As someone who prefers a traditional taskbar to whatever you call GNOME’s default experience, heavy customization is in order.

First, we need the component that makes extensions work, as explained here. I’m on EndeavourOS, so the AUR comes in handy.

yay -S chrome-gnome-shell

Now we can go to extensions.gnome.org and add the browser extension. Once that’s done, we can enable all the extensions we want. “Dash to Panel” gives us the taskbar. I find “ArcMenu” essential as well. If you also hate the overview showing up every time you log in, “No overview at start-up” is for you.

There, job done! But we can do a lot more with extensions. Grab the “User Themes” extension and continue.

I’m using this theme. I installed it by cloning the git repo and running the install script. There are other ways to get themes installed, but basically they need to end up in ~/.themes so the extension can load them.

Get gnome-tweaks installed. This one is in the official repo for me, but I still use yay. You can do what you like.

yay -S gnome-tweaks

Then open up Tweaks and choose “Appearance.” Mainly “Applications” and “Shell” need to be changed here. If you got matching icons or cursors, you can set them here as well.

More extensions? How about “OpenWeather” and “Blur my Shell?” I also like “Dash to Dock” if you’re more into a macOS style dock.

With all that done, I can finally use GNOME without getting a headache.

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Windows CLI installer

Windows 10/11 has a command line software installer! It’s limited to what’s in the Microsoft Store, but still very useful.

Go to the MS Store and install App Installer. If it’s already installed, make sure it gets updated. Then you can use winget on the command line:

winget install firefox

…for example. More info, including usage, can be found here. The search and show options are of particular interest.

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