Home / ubuntu / Questions / 272965
Accepted
l0b0
Asked: 2013-03-28 00:46:52 +0800 CST

How to list gnome-control-center panel names?

  • 772

There's an (as far as I can tell) undocumented feature of gnome-control-center which can be used to show a specific panel directly. For example, gnome-control-center sound will display the "Sound" panel. I've been trying to figure out what the "Keyboard Layout" panel is called, without success:

gnome-control-center keyboard # Just the "Typing" and "Shortcuts" tabs
gnome-control-center layout # Not found
gnome-control-center keyboardlayout # Not found
gnome-control-center 'keyboard layout' # Not found

Where can I find the list of panel names to use with this command?

gnome

3 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    If you have 3.8 installed a new feature is available which makes finding out the panel names a lot quicker, this was added in the 3.8 branch only, as of 01-10-2013, for reference this is the commit that added the feature:

    (g-c-c) Add --list command-line option 

    gnome-control-center -l

    which will give the following with a list.

    Available panels:
background
bluetooth
color
datetime
display
info
keyboard
mouse
network
notifications
online-accounts
power
printers
privacy
region
search
sharing
sound
universal-access
user-accounts
wacom
    • 9

  2. I think what you want is gnome-control-center region; that should launch the keyboard layout and regional language settings.

    Further below is the full listing of individual gnome-control-center commands that are used to launch the various settings panels. It has been found by checking off ones I knew against the source code (although dpkg -L gnome-control-center might also be useful).

    You can download the source code with

    apt-get source gnome-control-center

    Now, when you examine it you will see there is a desktop file in each folder in gnome-control-center-3.4.2/panels/ that has an exec line. As an example, /wacom/gnome-wacom-panel.desktop.in contains the line: Exec=gnome-control-center wacom.

    Complete list for reference (most are easily guessable, but I list here for completeness)

    1) Wacom Graphics Tablet ---> gnome-control-center wacom

    2) Keyboard Layout ---> gnome-control-center region

    3) User Accounts ---> gnome-control-center user-accounts

    4) Keyboard Shortcuts ---> gnome-control-center keyboard

    5) Universal Access ---> gnome-control-center universal-access

    6) Sound Volume/events (Unity only) ---> gnome-control-center sound-nua

    7) Sound Volume/events ---> gnome-control-center sound

    (see also gnome-sound-applet for desktop volume control)

    8) Screen brightness and lock ---> gnome-control-center screen

    9) Printers ---> gnome-control-center printers

    10) Power Management ---> gnome-control-center power

    11) Network settings ---> gnome-control-center network

    12) Mouse and touchpad ---> gnome-control-center mouse

    13) System Information ---> gnome-control-center info

    14) Displays ---> gnome-control-center display

    15) Date and Time ---> gnome-control-center datetime

    16) Color management ---> gnome-control-center color

    17) Bluetooth ---> gnome-control-center bluetooth

    18) Desktop background ---> gnome-control-center background

    19) Language (this is slightly different) ---> gnome-language-selector

    (but also see gnome-control-center region for some language settings.

    For more information, see man gnome-control-center and the official site.

    • 2

  3. As of January 2016 this page is the first hit on google search for "gnome-control-center get list of panels" and (surprise!) the correct answer given 3 years ago is no longer correct.

    You'd have thought that they'd come up with a sane way of getting the list of panels by now right? Wrong! (somebody correct me if I'm wrong!).

    This is what I resorted to:

    strace 2>&1 -f gnome-control-center | grep panel

    Then inspect that output for the likely places where it looks for panels.

    So to save you the time here's how you'd get the list of panels as of January 2016 (I'm sure it's not 100% reliable, but hey, it works for me at the moment!):

    ls /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/control-center-1/panels/|sed -e 's/lib//' -e 's/.so//' -e 's/_//g'

    If you are running 32bit obviously it won't work for you because of that x86_64 thingy so go back to the strace command above and work your way from there.

    I have a feeling that this method will stop working in, oh, say, 6 months time.

    • 0