Kiwi is not Apple

Kiwi is a GNOME Shell extension that mimics various macOS features. This extension provides a collection of small quality-of-life functionalities such as moving windows to new workspaces, adding the username to the quick menu, focusing launched windows, and more.

Features

• Under the hood restyling: very minimal Gnome shell and GTK/Adwaita app restyling keeping maximum look and compatibility. Reduced menu item spacing; menu item accent colors; uniform top panel status icon padding and more...
• Window Control Button Style: Set macOS window control button styles and sizes.
• Firefox Styling: Apply macOS window control styling for Firefox.
• Show Window Controls in Panel: Move buttons to top panel for maximized windows and remove window titlebars for maximum space.
• Show Window title: Display current window title in the top panel
• Show Panel on Hover: Show panel when mouse is near top edge in fullscreen. Bugged for GTK4 apps.
• Move Window to New Workspace: Automatically move fullscreen app to new workspace.
• Set Panel Transparnecy: Make the top panel transparent or opaque when window touches it
• Transparent Move: Make windows slightly transparent when moving.
• Battery Percentage: Show battery percentage in the system menu when below 20% and on battery.
• Move calendar to the right: Move calendar to right side and hide and add notifications and media controls to Quick Settings.
• Overview Wallpaper Background blur. Use blurred current wallpaper as overview background (requires ImageMagick).
• Multilingual UI: Ships with translations for 16 languages (de, es, et, fa, fi, fr, it, ko, lt, lv, nb, nl, pl, pt, sv, zh_CN, tr) and is easy to extend via po/ files.

Extras

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• Add Username to Quick Menu: Display the username in the quick settings menu.
• Caps Lock Icon: Display Caps Lock or Num Lock icon in the GNOME top panel.
• Hide Activities Button: Hide the Activities button in the top panel
• Hide Minimized Windows: Hide minimized windows in the overview
• Skip Overview on Login: Do not show the overview when logging into GNOME; go directly to the desktop.
• Launchpad Applications: Add custom launch applications icon to the dock. Move it freely to any place.
• Style Keyboard Indicator. Style keyboard/input source indicator in panel by converting to uppercase and adding border. Also can hide it.
• Focus Launched Window: Focus on newly launched windows. Removes the annoying window-ready notification.

Recommended Extensions for better experience

• Dash to Dock by michele_g
• Compiz alike magic lamp effect by hermes83
• Kiwi Menu by kem-a (Me)
• AppIndicator Support by 3v1n0
• Gtk4 Desktop Icons NG (DING) by smedius
• Clipboard Indicator by Tudmotu
• Light Style by fmuellner
• Weather or Not by somepaulo

Known Issues

• in multimonitor setup sometimes max number of workspaces are created. See issue #49.
• move to fullscreen can behave unexpectedly due to built in GNOME dynamic workspace management. Disabling it might help.
• Advanced triple button hover effect will not work for GTK3 flatpak apps due to sandboxing
• Electron apps now by default have wayland enabled which causes to use CSD and thus many title bar issues, like blurry icons or completely different window control icons. There is no CSS fix beyond avoiding forced Wayland or passing --ozone-platform=x11 argument to force Xwayland usage.
• similarly to electron apps also KDE apps by default uses CSD on wayland causing the same issues. To force Xwayland usage for KDE apps have to pass environmental variable QT_QPA_PLATFORM=xcb.

Flatpak theming

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Run this command to override `xdg-config` and theme window control buttons for Flatpak apps:

flatpak override --user --filesystem=xdg-config/gtk-3.0:ro
flatpak override --user --filesystem=xdg-config/gtk-4.0:ro
flatpak override --user --filesystem=xdg-config/environment.d/:ro
flatpak override --user --filesystem=$HOME/.local/share/gnome-shell/extensions/kiwi@kemma/:ro

Contributing Translations

Want to help translate Kiwi to your language? See the translation guide for instructions.

Advanced

The advanced/ folder contains additional features that cannot be distributed through the GNOME Extensions platform due to security policies:

• Titlebuttons Hover Effect: Provides macOS-like hover effects for window controls for GTK3 apps
• Requires manual compilation and installation
• See advanced/README.md for detailed installation instructions

License

GPL-3.0-or-later. See LICENSE.