Home / ubuntu / Questions / 490939
Accepted
albhilazo
Asked: 2014-07-03 10:35:41 +0800 CST

Configure gnome-shell extensions from command line

  • 772

I like to run a couple of scripts to automatically install packages and do some configurations on fresh OS installs. I use gnome shell with a few extensions and was thinking of improving my scripts to configure them.

I usually configure the extensions using gnome-shell-extension-prefs or dconf-editor and I know how to edit other schemas from the command line. Example:

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.background picture-options stretched

But, although I can find and edit the installed extensions under org.gnome.shell.extensions using dconf-editor I can't access them using gsettings since they don't seem to have an assigned schema:

No such schema 'org.gnome.shell.extensions.extname'

The only extensions accessible with gsettings seem to be the ones that came pre-installed.

So, the question is, how can I configure the installed extensions from the command line? Is there any way to assign to gsettings the compiled schemas in ~/.local/share/gnome-shell/extensions/ ? Maybe I'm looking in the wrong direction.

Environment: Ubuntu Gnome 14.04 (Gnome Shell 3.10.4)

Thanks in advance.

gsettings

3 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Found the answer by myself in the end.

    sudo cp ~/.local/share/gnome-shell/extensions/extname/schemas/org.gnome.shell.extensions.extname.gschema.xml \
    /usr/share/glib-2.0/schemas/ &&
sudo glib-compile-schemas /usr/share/glib-2.0/schemas/

    Copy and compile the schemas in ~/.local/share/gnome-shell/extensions and gsettings will be able to work with them.

    • 13

  2. In CentOS 7 - and I would think in Ubuntu also - I've identified what I think is a slight improvement on the accepted answer by introducing the --schemadir switch as follows:

    # gsettings --schemadir ${schemaDir} set ${schema} ${key} "${value}"

    In the above command gsettings directly sets ${key} to ${value} in ${schema} where ${schema} does not reside in the default /usr/share/glib-2.0/schemas directory. (and there is no requirement to move the schema to the default directory)

    Some examples:

    gsettings --schemadir ~/.local/share/gnome-shell/extensions/[email protected]/schemas/ list-recursively org.gnome.shell.extensions.org-lab21-putwindow
gsettings --schemadir ~/.local/share/gnome-shell/extensions/[email protected]/schemas/  list-recursively org.gnome.shell.extensions.app-keys
gsettings --schemadir ~/.local/share/gnome-shell/extensions/[email protected]/schemas/  list-recursively org.gnome.shell.extensions.emoji-selector
    • 7

  3. I've written this script: Bash script to enable/disable gnome-shell-extensions and more.

    Just cp it in /usr/bin or /usr/local/bin and make it executable:

    sudo chmod +x /usr/bin/gnome-shell-extension-cl

    Check the help.

    Enable extension:

    gnome-shell-extension-cl -e extension-name

    Disable extension: 

    gnome-shell-extension-cl -d extension-name
    • 1