gnome-desktop-customizer

Note: This skill was written with the help of Claude (Anthropic's AI assistant) and has not been fully reviewed or tested by a human. The commands and advice in it are believed to be correct but may contain errors, especially across different GNOME/Ubuntu versions. Review what Claude proposes before letting it make changes, and please open an issue if you find a mistake.

An Agent Skill for Claude Code (and any other harness that supports the same SKILL.md format) that teaches Claude how to customize the GNOME desktop and the Nautilus/Files file manager on Ubuntu — safely, and without you having to look up the right gsettings key or extension API every time.

Covers GNOME 42 (Ubuntu 22.04 LTS) and GNOME 46+ (Ubuntu 24.04 LTS and newer), and calls out the places those two diverge.

What it's for

Ask Claude things like:

• "Add a 'New File' option to the right-click menu in Files"
• "Add a right-click action that opens the current folder in VS Code"
• "Show seconds in the clock" / any other gsettings-backed toggle
• "Set up a custom keyboard shortcut for X"
• "Install this GNOME Shell extension" / "list my enabled extensions"
• "Run this script automatically when I log in"

Instead of improvising or sending you off to search documentation yourself, Claude follows the skill's workflows: identify your GNOME version, make the change through the correct mechanism (Templates folder, Nautilus Scripts, nautilus-python, gsettings/dconf, gnome-extensions, autostart .desktop files), back up anything non-trivial to revert first, and verify the change actually took effect.

Install

Clone directly into Claude Code's skills directory:

git clone https://github.com/andyharless/gnome-desktop-customizer.git ~/.claude/skills/gnome-desktop-customizer

For a project-local install instead of a global one, clone into .claude/skills/gnome-desktop-customizer inside your project.

Once installed, Claude will automatically use this skill for relevant requests — no further setup needed. You do not need to be running Claude Code inside GNOME for this to work; Claude just needs a shell on the Ubuntu machine you want to customize (for example, a remote or SSH session into that machine works too, though some changes need your graphical session's environment to apply).

What it won't do without asking

• Any sudo apt install is called out and confirmed first (needed only for a few optional helper packages: python3-nautilus, dconf-editor, gnome-tweaks, gnome-shell-extension-manager).
• Nothing is edited outside ~/.config, ~/.local/share, or ~/Templates (apart from backup files written to your home directory).
• Broader dconf/gsettings changes get backed up first so they can be reverted.

Scope

This is about your own desktop and file-manager behavior — context menus, settings, shortcuts, extensions, autostart. It's not a general Linux sysadmin skill (services, users, networking, logs); pair it with something like linux-sysadmin-skills if you want that too.

Contributing

Issues and PRs welcome, especially:

• Ubuntu 24.04+/GNOME 46+ specifics if something here is stale
• Additional common workflows (e.g. Nemo/other file managers, more extension patterns)
• Corrections to any command that's drifted with a GNOME/Nautilus release

License

MIT — see LICENSE.