CentOS 7/GNOME 3 Customise Top Panel

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Hi,

Is there any way to customise the top panel in CentOS 7 with GNOME 3
(which I recently tried for the first time)? Specifically, I want to add
“application launchers”, as it will make start-up faster than the standard alternatives. (Because you can move the mouse directly to the right place – you don’t have to carry out another action, wait for icons or menu items to pop up, look for the right one etc first.)

People on the web talk about a “context” menu that opens if you use some kind of weird combination of right mouse-click and Alt, Windows key, Ctrl, left click, Alt Gr or whatever, but there seems to be no way to make that happen on CentOS.

I found an answer of sorts in https://www.CentOS.org/forums/viewtopic.php?tG957 –
– but I don’t think I quite understand it. I mean, the ability to add extensions is nice, but if the panel is locked, isn’t an “unlock”
function what I should be looking for? This doesn’t quite sound like an
“extension”. Or is the actual menu everyone talks about itself an extension? If that’s the case, surely isn’t there some other way to make the changes? If the standard panel allows stuff to be added, there must be a standard way to do it, right?

Also, if I do need extensions, I’d prefer to install it via the package manager system rather than through a special web interface…

Does anyone know more about this? Any help would be appreciated. –
Except, that is, I don’t really need anyone to suggest switching to MAME
or some other alternative desktop. I might end up doing just that, but it really bugs me that I can’t get functionality that’s supposed to be there to work…

– Toralf

7 thoughts on - CentOS 7/GNOME 3 Customise Top Panel

  • Hi Toralf,

    Have a look at https://extensions.gnome.org/ specificity https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/6/applications-menu/
    also look at Gnome Tweak Tool which lets you make some other changes to how Gnome 3 works. That application Menu I believe will work on C7 (I’m using F24 as my desktop)

    Tris

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  • Maybe I should have been a bit more specific; I don’t want launchers in a menu accessed from the panel – I want the icons to appear directly in the panel itself.

    I tried this earlier, but didn’t find any setting related to what I want.

    The menu is actually there already – the relevant extension seems to be pre-installed.

    In the Fedora version, what happens if you press Alt and right-click on the panel? If the answer is “nothing”, how about
    “Windows”+Alt+right-click or Ctrl+Alt+right-click?

    – Toralf

  • Ok, I think I understand now. Does this not work?
    https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/4/panel-favorites/

    Those do nothing for me either.

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  • Il giorno ven, 14/10/2016 alle 14.39 +0200, Toralf Lund ha scritto:

    Gnome 3 don’t like comfortable “personal application launcher” and you’re happy. It want you use mouse and keyboard to run some standard apps. If you want use this DE like all DE, you must install and active some extension.

    Specially do not like Right click in some places and “Add new Launcher”, this is gone for a long time and I believe dont’t come back. 

    I use this extension to launch my custom application with personal setting, like personal shell command and SSH connections:

    https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/699/connection-manager/

    For now, with some hack work, but it seems is no longer supported in the future, and I’m not a java script expert to maintainer it.

    I use Gnome on Fedora from a long time unfortunately, but When this extension (connman) will no longer work on a next new version of Gnome, I stop using Gnome and shall, with a bit of difficulty, go to another DE.
     


    Dario Lesca
    (inviato dal mio Linux Fedora 24 Workstation)

  • I believe a prominent GNOME developer once talked about the “un-break my application” preference in the context of how not to implement configurability. And now GNOME has turned into a system where you need
    “un-break my desktop environment” extensions…

    But how about adding other stuff, like “system-wide” extensions?

    Like I said, it does seem like users of other distributions get some kind of configuration options via right-click…

    :-(

    – T

  • This extension will add your favourites from ‘Activites’ onto the top panel and can be installed in CentOS as it is in the main repo.

    sudo yum install gnome-shell-extension-panel-favorites

    This maybe something for the original author to try and see if it fits their needs. Unsure about custom launchers with this extension.

    Regards

    Phil

  • This may well do what I need. Just didn’t notice it when I looked at extensions earlier. I’ll test this later. (I’m not on a CentOS 7 machine right now.)

    Good. That’s the way we want it. One thing we’ve told users to do in the past is to edit a certain pre-installed launcher after dragging it from the panel to the desktop
    (and they didn’t find it hard or confusing…) Perhaps something like that won’t be possible with this extension. But I’ll find out what can be done.

    – Toralf