GNOME is highly configurable — you can change almost anything: background color, key bindings, location of panels and contents of the GNOME Menu, and more. To see examples of different customizations of GNOME desktop, take a look at the screenshots on GNOME website and notice how different they look.
The following sections list some of the most common customizations. In addition, you can change properties of various items — most notably, panels and icons on your desktop — by clicking on them with the right mouse button and selecting Properties from the popup menu.
Almost every GNOME application has its own preferences settings (look for Preferences or Settings in the menus), so you can change, for example, colors used by the GNOME Terminal or make it transparent — the possibilities are unlimited!
To customize the appearance of your desktop and user interface, use special desktop preference tools, which can be found in Desktop Preferences submenu of Applications menu. You can also access the preferences tools by double-clicking on Start Here icon on your desktop. This will open a Nautilus window. Double-click on Preferences and then on the tool you require.
Here we would like to give an overview of the most commonly used preferences tools.
This tool allows you to change desktop background. You can select solid color, gradient (visual effect where one color blends gradually into another color), or an image file.
You can also change desktop background color by right-clicking on desktop background and choosing Change Desktop Background, or by dragging a color from another window or dialog to desktop background.
This tool allows you to change the desktop theme (to be precise, GTK2 theme). A theme is a collection of settings that determine the look of all menus, panels, toolbars, scrollbars, checkbuttons and other elements of graphical user interface for all GNOME applications.
You can select one of the themes installed as part of your GNOME distribution, or download and install more themes from the Internet. In particular, you can find many GTK themes at Sunshine In a Bag website (look for GTK2 themes).
Please note that GTK2 theme will not change the appearance of window decorations (borders, titlebars, and buttons in window titlebar); this is determined by your window manager settings and can be changed as described in Section 7.2 ― Customizing Window Manager. Also, GTK 2 theme only controls GNOME 2 applications. If you are using GNOME 1.x applications in GNOME 2, their appearance will not be affected (it is determined by GTK1 theme which is configured independently from GTK 2 themes).
This tool allows you to choose the default font which will be used by all menus, dialogs, and other user interface elements. This overrides the font specified by your desktop theme.
To customize Sawfish window manager, middle-click on the desktop and choose Customize submenu. This submenu contains a number of customization tools. The same tools can also be accessed using Applications ▸ Desktop Preferences ▸ Advanced ▸ Sawfish.
Most popular customization tool is Appearance, which allows you to select the window manager theme (which determines the appearance of window frame, titlebar, and buttons) and font to use in window titlebar. Other tools (such as Bindings tool which allows you to specify keybindings for various window operations) are only recommended for advanced users.
You can customize GNOME panels as follows:
To remove a panel, right-click on a vacant space on the panel and choose Remove this panel from the panel popup menu.
To create a new panel, right-click on a vacant space on any existing panel and choose Create panel from the panel popup menu.
To move an existing panel to a new location, drag it with the middle mouse button.
The menu panel can not be moved.
To modify panel properties (background, size, auto-hide), right-click on a vacant space on the panel and choose Properties from the panel popup menu.
To remove an object (menu, applet, application launcher) from the panel, right-click on the object and choose Remove from panel from the object popup menu.
To add a new object to the panel, right-click on a vacant space on the panel and choose Add to panel from the panel popup menu. Alternatively, to add an application from one of the menus as a launcher to the panel, right-click on the menu item and choose Add this launcher to panel from the popup menu.
To move a panel object, drag it with the middle mouse button. You can even drag an object from one panel to another.
To configure a panel object, right-click on it and choose Properties from the popup menu.