Refine, the graphical configuration tool for GNOME, got a new feature update few days ago.
Refine is a GNOME Tweaks alternative app that provides a graphical interface to configure advanced and experimental features in GNOME Desktop.
The app is in early development stage that keeps adding new features. And, now it supports re-arranging window title buttons.
Previously users can use GNOME Tweaks to enable/disable minimize and maximize buttons, and place title buttons in left or right.
GNOME Tweaks Title-bar Button settings
While advanced users can either run gsettings command or use Dconf Editor app to change the /org/gnome/desktop/wm/preferences/button-layout key value with more choices. For example, the command below will move close, minimize buttons to the left and hide the maximize button.
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.wm.preferences button-layout 'close,minimize:'
Dconf Editor titlebar button settings
To make life easier, Refine add a more straightforward way, allowing to drag and drop re-arranging minimize, maximize, close button to the left/right, add-or-hiding buttons. See the short video above.
For choice, user may also click one of the buttons in the Refine setting page to expand the menu to do ‘Move Left’, ‘Move Right’, and ‘Hide’ actions. And, there’s a “Reset” option to revert button layout to the original!
Refine title bar button settings
NOTE: The window button layout change does NOT work for some apps, e.g., Chrome and Ubuntu’s App Center, because they either use their own internal settings or use different GUI framework.
How to Install Refine:
NOTE: Ubuntu has customized version of GNOME that Refine does NOT support. Some features may NOT work and are even grayed out, and user needs to accept the risk at every launch.
Refine is available to install in most Linux on amd64 and arm64 platforms through Flatpak package.
Fedora Workstation with 3rd party repository enabled can directly search for and install it from GNOME Software.
While Debian, Ubuntu, and other Linux may install the package by running the commands below one by one:
- First, open terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T) and run command to enable Flatpak support:
sudo apt install flatpak
For non-Debian/Ubuntu based Linux Distros, see the official guide instead.
- After that, run the single command below to install the Flatpak package:
flatpak install https://dl.flathub.org/repo/appstream/page.tesk.Refine.flatpakref
Refine can be installed, but not works in Ubuntu
After installation, launch it either from GNOME Overview, or by running flatpak run page.tesk.Refine command instead in terminal.
Uninstall Refine:
To uninstall the Flatpak package, open terminal and use command:
flatpak uninstall --delete-data page.tesk.Refine
You may also run flatpak uninstall --unused to clear useless run-time libraries.
