Elegance Colors GNOME Shell Theme Gets New Customization Options

Elegance Colors, a GNOME Shell theme that can automatically change its colors based on the current GTK theme or wallpaper, has been updated today with many new customization options.

Here's what's new in Elegance Colors 1.1:

• Options to customize Background color, Text color, Border color, Background opacity, Border opacity etc. for Panel, Menu and Dialogs
• Added 5 inbulit presets to choose from
• Better export dialog for exporting the theme
• Ability to import/export settings (via the Gmenu on the top GNOME Shell panel)
• Support deriving color from more GTK themes
• Toggling "Monitor changes" now starts or stops the background process accordingly
• New styles for Buttons and Entries
• Option to customize Font family
• Option to customize the Gradient for the Dash in overview
• Option to customize Roundness of the theme

With this release, Elegance Colors has evolved from a chameleonic and beautiful, but other than that a pretty much standard theme, to basically a template that you can use to make your own custom GNOME Shell themes.

A few screenshots:

Various customizations + color derived from the wallpaper

Color derived from GTK theme

Even though they look like completely different themes, I'm using Elegance Colors in all the images, but customized using the built-in preferences dialog. And that's just a small part of what you can do using the Elegance Colors customization tool.

Install Elegance Colors in Ubuntu 12.10

The latest Elegance Colors is available in its official PPA for Ubuntu 12.10 / GNOME Shell 3.6. Add the PPA and install the theme using the following commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:satyajit-happy/themes
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install gnome-shell-theme-elegance-colors

For other Linux distributions, you can download GNOME Shell Elegance Colors theme from DeviantArt or GitHub.



To use Elegance Colors, you'll need the User Themes GNOME Shell extension which can be installed via extensions.gnome.org or from the Ubuntu 12.10 repositories:

sudo apt-get install gnome-shell-extensions

If you've installed the User Themes extensions via GNOME's website, you'll need to run the following command for Elegance Colors to work:

sudo elegance-colors fix

If you've upgraded from an older Elegance Colors version, firstly stop the Elegance Colors process using the following command:

killall elegance-colors

Once you've installed the theme and the User Themes extension, run the following command in a terminal to start the Elegance Colors process, which is used to apply the theme changes:

elegance-colors

You can also simply log out and log back in.

And finally, set the new theme via GNOME Tweak Tool > Theme > Shell theme and tweak it by launching Elegance Colors Preferences from the Activities Overview.