Some fun with the macOS layout
Sunday, 29 July 2018 16:31![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
zimenaI've been having fun with the macOS desktop layout lately. Of course, there's only so much you can do about the look of things in macOS (and admittedly the many different possibilities for how things can look is one of my reasons for sometimes checking out some Linux distributions in a virtual machine). However, I found a nice little tool called uBar, and with that in place I could suddenly change more than just the wallpaper.
Have a look at my current desktop:
So, what changed compared to the regular macOS layout? Of course, the default dock has been disabled entirely. There is also an option to stick it on the right side and use auto-hide, but I kind of didn't want it to pop out randomly if I move my cursor over there. Instead, there's an uBar on the left. I quite like that it takes up the whole column (inspired by Ubuntu's Unity desktop), but there's also an option to only let it cover the amount of space you actually have icons in it for. Also, the uB icon on top has a menu of shortcuts that can be customised according to your needs - I'm not even done with that yet.
Other than that, I also changed to a matching wallpaper, and I turned on macOS' dark menu line. It can be either completely black with white-ish icons and text, or semi-transparent as it is here - the transparency setting is hidden in Accessibility settings, though. One more thing that you can't see here, is that I also changed my Chrome theme to something matching these colours.
Oh, and the colours? Are from Ubuntu's official colour palette, so it's definitely possible to "beautify" the macOS environment with more interesting colours. For now this is something fun and unusual, but I guess it might take some time to get used to uBar. It doesn't work exactly like the regular Dock, so some habits and routines will have to change to adapt to the new environment.
Let's see how that goes...?
Have a look at my current desktop:
So, what changed compared to the regular macOS layout? Of course, the default dock has been disabled entirely. There is also an option to stick it on the right side and use auto-hide, but I kind of didn't want it to pop out randomly if I move my cursor over there. Instead, there's an uBar on the left. I quite like that it takes up the whole column (inspired by Ubuntu's Unity desktop), but there's also an option to only let it cover the amount of space you actually have icons in it for. Also, the uB icon on top has a menu of shortcuts that can be customised according to your needs - I'm not even done with that yet.
Other than that, I also changed to a matching wallpaper, and I turned on macOS' dark menu line. It can be either completely black with white-ish icons and text, or semi-transparent as it is here - the transparency setting is hidden in Accessibility settings, though. One more thing that you can't see here, is that I also changed my Chrome theme to something matching these colours.
Oh, and the colours? Are from Ubuntu's official colour palette, so it's definitely possible to "beautify" the macOS environment with more interesting colours. For now this is something fun and unusual, but I guess it might take some time to get used to uBar. It doesn't work exactly like the regular Dock, so some habits and routines will have to change to adapt to the new environment.
Let's see how that goes...?