Window border themes
Used by the Metacity window manager to control the appearance of the window borders, title bar, and title bar buttons.
Icons
Control the appearance of icons on the panel, desktop, application toolbars, and Nautilus file manager.
One component theme from each category can be combined into an overall desktop theme .
To change themes, select SystemPreferencesTheme from the panel menu. The window shown on the left of Figure 2-6 will appear.
Figure 2-6. Theme preferences tool
You can select a desktop theme from this list by clicking on it. The theme will start to load immediately, and the appearance of your desktop will change in a few seconds.
To create a custom combination of component themes, click the Theme Details button. The window shown on the right of Figure 2-6 will be displayed. There is a tab for each of the three component theme types. You can select a different theme for any of the components, and when you do, a Custom Theme entry will appear in the main Theme Preferences window. Your selection will take effect immediately so that you can preview the effect. Once you are satisfied with a combination of component themes, click on the Save Theme button to name the combination and save it as a desktop theme.
To install additional component themes, open a browser and go to http://art.gnome.org/ , and open the Theme Preferences window in an adjacent part of the screen. When you find a theme on art.gnome.org that you wish to install, simply drag the download icon (a small floppy disk) from the browser window to the Theme Preferences window, and it will automatically be installed. You can then combine that component theme with others to produce a new desktop theme as described earlier.
2.2.1.2. Customizing the panels
You can add another panel by right-clicking on an existing one and selecting
and the colors used for that style. The color or gradient selected here will fill any part of the background not covered by an image and will show through background images that have transparency.
2.2.1.4. Customizing the window manager's behavior
Select windows when the mouse moves over them
This behavior is called focus-follows-mouse and is very popular with some long-time users of the X Window System. Normally, you need to click on a window to give it focus in other words, the last window clicked is the window that receives keyboard input. If you select this checkbox, you can focus a window simply by placing your mouse pointer over it. This is convenient, but if your mouse pointer drifts to another window, you may end up typing into the wrong window.
If you select "focus-follows-mouse," then you can optionally configure the window manager to automatically raise focused windows after a brief pause, so that they are on top of other windows.
Titlebar Action
Configures the window manager to maximize or shade a window when the titlebar is double-clicked.
Movement Key
This setting selects the modifier key for moving windows. If you hold down the selected modifier and click on a window, you can drag it to a new location.
2.2.1.5. Customizing Nautilus
Here are some common customizations for Nautilus:
The appearance of folder contents can be separately configured for each folder using the Nautilus toolbar. To configure default settings, set the View New Folders Using and the Arrange Items options on the Views tab.
To disable the spatial behavior of Nautilus, select the Behavior tab and select the "Always Open in Browser Windows" checkbox.
To enable the direct deletion of files (instead of placing them in the trash, which requires the trash to be emptied before the disk space is freed up), select "Include a Delete Command that Bypasses Trash" on the Behavior tab. Right-clicking on a file will now expose both the normal "Move to Trash" option and a new Delete option.
2.2.1.6. Customizing keyboard shortcuts
Fedora's GNOME configuration contains a good set of keyboard shortcuts. To change shortcuts or add new ones, select the menu option SystemPreferencesKeyboard Shortcuts, which displays the window shown in Figure 2-8.
Figure 2-8. GNOME Keyboard Shortcuts window
This window shows a number of actions on the desktop and the shortcut key for each. To change a shortcut, click on an entry. The shortcut for that entry will change to read New Accelerator. Press the key or key combination that you wish to use for that keyboard shortcut; if the shortcut is not already in use, it will be assigned to the selected action, and if it is in use, the conflict will be displayed in an error dialog.
To remove a keyboard shortcut, click on an entry, and then press Backspace.
If you have a "multimedia" keyboard with keys for sound control and common applications, you can in most cases use those keys as shortcuts. However, the Keyboard Shortcuts window will show these keys as hexadecimal codes, as shown in the highlighted line in Figure 2-8. Not all keys can be used as shortcuts because some multimedia keyboards are internally divided to act as two separate keyboards, with multimedia keys being sent to a different output. In a few rare cases, the multimedia keys don't generate normal keyboard scancodes at all.