Can Themes or other Customization Options Fix These?

Ask Fedora
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1

I’m running into a number of problems in Fedora. Gnome Tweaks helps, but it doesn’t solve all of these. I can’t figure out how to set up themes, or whether I could use themes to solve some of these.

  1. The Gnome Menu.

I don’t have the coordination for all the nested sub-menus. It would help if I could a. get a theme which visually separates the columns, because if I slip into the wrong column I have to start over, b. get an option to click on a submenu and stay in that sub-menu, instead of having to start over, and over, and over, and c. use more top-level menus so there aren’t as many sub-menus.

  1. Font Sizes in the Top and Bottom Panels.

These don’t respond to my settings in Gnome Tweaks.

  1. Font Rendering everywhere.

I can switch fonts, increase some font sizes, and change rendering in Gnome Tweaks. I would like more options to make them darker and/or bolder and thus more readable. I asked here, before getting Gnome Tweaks working: Is there a way to make all text bold?

  1. Shadows behind Icons.

I want to get rid of them. I asked here: How do I get rid of the shadow/blur effects in Gnome Classic?

I think themes can help with this, but Software doesn’t include previews of which themes change what.

  1. Scrollbars.

I can disable most of the overlay effects in Accessibility, but I can’t find a way to widen them. I know Linux Mint Cinnamon has this option.

2

Most windows have the scrollbars shrunk to give more window space on both the right and bottom. When one moves the mouse pointer over them they seem to widen automatically for me. I have no clue how to force the scrollbars to remain in the enlarged state.

3

I may not be the best source of advice, as I’ve spent most of my career in emacs.

I use Alacritty, which has no scrollbar at all, but spend a lot of time between emacs, Rstudio, and Jupyter Notebook. Emacs in GUI mode has scrollbars and a `shell mode with convenient shortcuts to jump to the previous shell prompt, etc., Emacs does have a setting for scrollbar width, but warns me not to use it in Emacs built with GTK. Emacs has a shell mode that lets you jump to previous prompt, etc. so scrolling is not as necessary as with other tools. For me, emacs has the advantage that it is nearly the same across Windows, macOS, and linux as it was back in the time of dumb CRT terminals connected to UNIX by serial ports.

Rstudio provide pretty wide scrollbars by default. Google Chrome has Secure Shell (never used it myself).

4

You could use Scaling Factor on Gnome Tweaks > Fonts on very bottom option available there.

5

One of the add-ons could apply the scaling factor to the top panel. Sorry, I can’t recall which, and can’t check from this partition.

But I’m running into:

  1. No indication of which modifier keys are active.

I have coordination problems, so I need Sticky Keys, and I have coordination problems, so I can’t tell when and how I’ve mis-typed. Somehow I get some of these stuck, and then everything going haywire…

6

See upstream issue, it mentions an extension that could help: There should be an onscreen indication when Sticky Keys is holding down a modifier key (#4706) · Issues · GNOME / gnome-shell · GitLab

This is intentional. GNOME dev says that Adwaita is not an accessible theme, so if you have a problem with their scrollbars, you should use an accessible theme (which doesn’t exist).

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7

I’ve tried installing Themes via Software. But I can’t get them to show up in Tweaks or in Extension Manager. (I’m also not sure whether I should use Extensions or Extension Manager.)

What instructions I’ve found either come in Youtube videos, which aren’t readable, or say to use various browser hacks, which seems weird and unsafe, or say to move them to my user folder. I don’t know where Software installed them.